


Merely Players

by raitala



Series: Merely Players [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-17
Updated: 2011-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-19 12:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raitala/pseuds/raitala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he gets into dreamsharing, Eames is a bit of a cocky little bastard, but he's good with people. Not a good man. Later, working dreams, Eames gets even better at playing people. He still isn't a good man. All right, he's still a cocky bastard too. Arthur is not impressed.</p><p>More or less stand-alone story, though the prologue refers to the series (two parts) as whole.</p><p>Huge thanks to Blamebrampton, Calanthe_fics, Pingrid and Pushdragon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merely Players

**Merely Players**

 _Prologue_

“Second Lieutenant Eames, what did I say to you when you were last here in my office?” said Colonel Fletcher, steepling his fingers in front of him on the desk.

“Sir, you said, any more incidents of this nature and you would have me out of the army so fast the door wouldn’t hit my arse on the way out. Sir,” said Eames smartly

“And yet, here we are again, Eames,” the Colonel said resignedly.

“Yes sir.”

“Let me ask, was it simply your intention to get thrown out?”

“No sir. It was my intension that the projectile in question would have sufficiently decreased in velocity to cause …”

“Eames! I already have the details of the episode in question.”

“Sir. I heard Willets’ leg is much better now, sir.”

“Yes, Captain Willets is indeed on the mend. But this does not alter the fact that we have, finally, come to an irrevocable parting of the ways, Eames.”

The Colonel paused and looked at Eames intently. “Eames, do you have any idea why the army – myself in particular – has put up with your endless shit, these past two years? Christ, Eames! I’ve been in the army for thirty years and served in three separate campaigns and my personnel file is still smaller than yours!”

“No sir, I don’t know.” Eames continued to stand, at ease as he had been instructed, gazing straight ahead of him at the chimneys of the mess kitchens he could see behind the Colonel’s left ear.

“Because, Eames, men like you can, on occasion, be very useful. You are ingenious, devious and, I believe the phrase is, ‘you think outside of the box.’ Twenty years ago, ten even, we could have made use of you. Small scale, special ops, where we’d drop a small unit of conniving little shits like you behind enemy lines and let them get on with causing as much mayhem as possible in their own unique fashion. Admittedly about half the time they just ended up setting up brothels or running guns, but when they worked they were highly effective and cheap. Two of the army’s favourite things.”

“You want me to go to Afghanistan and set up a brothel, sir?”

“No, Eames,” said Fletcher, not rising to the bait. “I said that was the case twenty years ago. These days, it’s not just the army running the army. We have politicians breathing down our necks, wetting their knickers at the least breath of scandal. We have the press, who couldn’t give a shit about the national interest, they just want to sell papers and clock up stats for their advertisers. We have the treasury all over us, wanting us to account for every boot and spare wheel. Worse than that, Eames, we have Human Resources.”

Eames winced in sympathy. “The point is,” Fletcher continued, “though you showed significant potential as an asset, it has now been determined that you are more of a liability. We can’t afford to kit you up and let you lose under our aegis, however hush hush, because if you do end up setting up a brothel or whathaveyou with our money and anyone finds out the whole bloody lot of them will be down on us like a ton of bricks.”

“Will I be serving out the rest of my term, sir?”

“No, you are out now, Eames. Now I’ve decided it isn’t worth the risk deploying you, there is no earthly point in my putting up with you for a moment longer. I’m disappointed, personally, you are a fucking nightmare of an officer and you aren’t even trying particularly hard. I’d have liked to see what you’d come up with if it was your intention to cause as much trouble as possible. If you’d just shown a bit more commitment, been a bit less impervious to direction … Well, it was an experiment and it hasn’t paid off. I want you out straight away. Tonight. You’re bad for morale.”

“The men love me, sir!” Eames protested.

“I’m not talking about the men,” said Fletcher in disgust, “I’m talking about your fellow officers! I’m talking about me, dammit! You give me a headache here, right behind my left eye.”

“So, that’s it, sir?”

“Yes Eames, that’s it. We’re discharging you on medical grounds.”

“What sort of grounds?”

“Undisclosed.”

“People will think I’m a nutter, sir.”

“If you think I’m giving you an honourable discharge, Eames, you really are out of your mind. Besides, I don’t imagine for one minute you are going to be going into the sort of work where they will look that closely at your discharge papers before taking you on.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t forget to hand over your gun. Don’t steal my car. Don’t rob my house. If I ever hear you have come within a hundred yards of either of my daughters I will kill you with my bare hands. It’s been enlightening serving with you, Eames. Be off the base by twenty two hundred hours. Good luck!”

*

“And that was the end of my service to Her Majesty. I took my gun of course, but I never touched Fletcher’s car. He was a lovely chap really. He loved that damned car. Wouldn’t have touched his daughters anyway, they looked like horses.” Eames stretched and took another sip of his coffee, only to grimace at finding it cold and gritty. At that moment the door of the garage opened and Arthur stepped in.

“Are we go?” Eames asked.

“Afraid not. False alarm. Sheller has yet to show.”

“Chr-rist! If we have to sit her for another night, doing nothing, I’m going to go out of my mind!” said Eames, exasperatedly. “Remind me, why we aren’t just extracting Sheller from his apartment?”

“We’ve gone over this, Eames,” said Arthur in a warning voice and Eames sighed and threw himself back in his seat.

“Is that the gun you took from the army?” Moss asked, gesturing to the Browning on the table in front of Eames. Arthur looked up, his eyes narrowing.

“Moss, what did I tell you at the start of this job?” Arthur asked.

“What?” said Moss, confused.”

“What did I say about Eames, Moss?”

“You said, he was the best forger in the business,” said Moss.

Arthur flushed slightly with annoyance. “I meant after that!”

“Oh, that unless it was a matter directly relating to the effective execution of the job, I wasn’t to listen to a damn word he said.”

Arthur looked at Moss pointedly.

“Oh,” said Moss. After a pause he turned back to Eames. “So, weren’t you really in the army?”

Arthur threw up his hands in a small ‘there’s no telling some people’ gesture.

“What day is it?” asked Eames.

“Thursday,” Moss replied.

“Then it must be true,” Eames continued, smiling genially, “I’m always ex-military on Thursdays.”

A highlighter ricocheted off Moss’ head. Sebastian smirked from behind his computer screen.

Arthur looked around at Moss’ reddening, perplexed face and Eames, jittery with boredom and coffee, and Sebastian, yawning expansively and looking mischievous and shook his head with apparent disgust. “Right, nothing’s going to happen tonight, people. Be back here same time tomorrow. If he hasn’t shown in another two nights, we’ll revisit the plan, OK?”

Eames was out of the door before he’d even finished talking.

Arthur watched him leave, then turned back to Moss. “He really just made all that up?” Moss asked.

“Eames’ mind works in its own unique way and that’s why I told you not to listen,” said Arthur, shrugging.

“You mean he’s mental!” huffed Moss, belatedly offended.

“Eames isn’t mental, he’s just perfectly formed …” Arthur tried to explain.

“I’ll say!” said Sebastian interrupting with a leer.

“Perfectly formed for his particular line of work,” continued Arthur, shooting a glare at Sebastian. “Like a well-adapted organism. I don’t know. If Dreamsharing, if forging hadn’t existed, Eames would have had to invent it, otherwise he’d have been a snail without a shell.”

“He’s fucked up,” grumbled Moss. “How did he get that way? Was he just born that way?”

“Bastard love child of Loki and Cassandra,” muttered Sebastian, shrugging into his coat and making his way across the garage.

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, smiling at Moss, who was still red faced and frowning. “He’s always been that way, more or less, since I’ve known him. I guess he made himself up.”

“But,” said Moss, whose tenaciousness Arthur had initially valued highly but which he was now beginning to find irritating, “if he wasn’t in the army, where did he come from? How did he learn to do what he does?”

“I don’t know if he was in the army or not,” said Arthur, ushering Moss out of the door. “Given his issues with discipline, I can only imagine his term of service was something like as short and eventful as he describes. I know he has a first class degree in English Literature from Oxford University, so at some point he must have spent a few years there.”

***

 _I: Oxford_

Eames shared his first rooms in College with a guy called Tim, a chicken-necked chap reading physics. He, however, noticed a lot of invitations in Tim’s pigeonhole addressed to ‘The Viscount Wetherhale’. A little judicious probing established that most of these invitations did not come from people Tim actually knew and when Eames mentioned that he’d really like to go to one or two of the bigger parties Tim, who was prodigiously awkward and had no interest in parties, was fine with Eames snagging whichever of the embossed cards took his fancy.

Of course, Eames didn’t go around pretending to be Viscount Wetherhale; that would have just been weird. The parties thrown at the beginning of the Michaelmas term were full of people who didn’t know one another. Eames quickly learnt to clown a bit without coming across as desperate and develop a line of flattery too extravagant to be taken seriously as sucking-up. It wasn’t long before everyone thought it was a riot that Eames had crashed their parties as Wetherhale, because had you seen fucking Wetherhale!?!

Eames couldn’t really see the point of spending his time analysing social snobbery in Jane Austen or human folly in King Lear, when he could be observing, and then playing with, the dynamics that made all the different groups at uni tick. The intellectual challenge of being a ‘rugby boy’ and ‘thesp’, a ‘yah’, a hard man and an intellectual, of being, in fact, whatever the situation called for offered far more stimulation than the library.

It wasn’t that Eames was a snob, per se, though he did like being taken in helicopters to shooting weekends in Scotland and flying in private jets to Paris for people’s birthdays. Of course, Eames was hardly unique in enjoying such things, so the challenge lay in getting past people’s natural defences about ‘hangers on’ and actually becoming a real friend. This meant putting in the hard hours, listening to rambling drunken angst, holding the hair of girls throwing up, lending money in emergencies and so on.

He ran up atrocious debts on credit cards, but that didn’t bother him. Credit was easily obtained and he was pretty confident that ‘something would come up’ post-uni. In addition, though rich kids were justifiably wary of spongers, they tended to be totally oblivious to people actually stealing from them.

*

Eames was hanging around his friend Henry’s rooms one afternoon, despite Henry’s protestations that he had to go out to tea with his grandmother, when there was a knock on the door. Henry let in a short, dark haired young woman, with small, sharp eyes, multiple piercings and a tattoo of a flight of birds across her collarbone.

“Granny told me she would pick us both up from your rooms,” the girl said, striding across the room and to stand watch in the window, her back turned to Henry and Eames.

“This is my cousin, Caroline,” said Henry. “She’s at St Hilda’s. Hates all men.”

“I don’t hate you because you’re a man, Henry,” sighed Caroline. “I hate you because you’re a twat. Well, I don’t really hate you,” she moderated. “But you are a twat.”

Eames, who privately agreed that Henry was indeed a twat, hopped down from his perch on the back of the sofa and went over to her. She seemed sort of interesting.

“Hi, I’m Eames. Would you like to go to the Keble ball with me?” he asked, interposing himself between her and the view.

“Hello Eames and no,” said Caroline, stepping to the side to resume her vigil.

“Is it because you don’t know me, or because I’m a friend of Henry’s or because you don’t want to go to the Keble ball?” Eames asked in a friendly fashion.

“Yes,” said Caroline, making a little gesture to encompass all Eames’ suggestions and then turned her attention away from him again and resumed gazing out of the window.

“Oh, well in that case, perhaps I could improve my chances by adjusting one or more of those propositions. Henry, you’re dumped, as friend,” Eames declared. Henry made a vague noise of protest. “Would you like to come and see the Richard III being put on in the Merton Gardens? I’ve heard it’s pretty good.”

Caroline gave him another brief flat look, “I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, well, in that case, would you just like to come for a drink with me some time?” replied Eames, smiling winningly.

Caroline turned to him, drawing herself upright, though she was really was quite short, and waved her hands in Eames face, speaking in a slow friendly fashion, as if to a dim child, “No. Not interested. OK?” She continued to wave her hand in front of his eyes as if trying to gauge if there was anybody home. “Granny’s car’s outside,” she announced, her attention caught by something outside the window. Turning away from Eames, she strode back across the room.

“I told you she hates men,” Henry said, nodding sagely. “Ow!” he exclaimed as Caroline punched him in the arm in passing.

Eames was, for no reason he could determine, enchanted. She wasn’t particularly beautiful or charming and it took a good month’s work to persuade her to look at him with something other than the hooded, suspicious gaze she reserved for Henry and his friends. But she was self-possessed, self-contained and content and there was something about that, the way she was comfortable in her own skin and regarded the world outside herself with detachment and wry humour that Eames found deeply appealing. Caroline behaved the same way with everyone. She seemed impervious to atmospheres, social expectations and other people’s moods. Eames, who soaked everyone and everything up like a sponge, found the trait strangely refreshing.

It took another two months to persuade Caroline to go out with him. At that point, he was pretty sure that he had everything he wanted. They would lie all day, cocooned in her duvet and Eames would make up extravagant stories about their future together. Sometimes they would both join MI6 and travel the world On Her Majesty’s Service. Or maybe they would find a ramshackle wreck of a castle and lovingly restore it, moat and all, and raise their children and goats there. Perhaps the stress of finals would lead them to find Jesus and they would become missionaries and ride across the Mongolian plains bringing God to the heathen races. Caroline would curl against his chest and laugh at him, call him a fool and just glow at him.

After about five months though, she didn’t glow so much and there started to be more, … what … exasperation, behind the names she called him. In a panic Eames doubled his efforts to be charming and entertaining. He bought her thoughtful gifts and took her out, but for some reason it didn’t seem to be working. One afternoon, Caroline, who had taken to wearing a t-shirt in bed, threw back the duvet and, turning her back on him, sat on the edge of the bed.

”What? What!?” asked Eames, sitting up.

Caroline rubbed her hand over her face and said nothing, shoulders hunched. Eames rolled over to her, kissing her neck, though she remained unresponsive.

“What is it, baby?”

”Look, stop it! ... I’m sorry. I don’t think this is all really working for me anymore.”

”What’s not working? What have I done?” Eames asked, baffled.

”It isn’t anything you’ve done. Well not really ... ”

“What?” Eames wracked his brain to think of something he could have been doing wrong, but couldn’t think of anything. He’d been great; the most delightful, fun, attentive boyfriend possible. He’d been perfect. “What is it? I can change. I can fix it?”

“I know you can,” said Caroline apologetically now, “and that’s sort of the problem ... I don’t think I’m really comfortable with that.”

“What?” Eames asked, slightly wild. “You don’t like that I’ll try. That I want you to be happy with me?”

“No. I just ... I just ... I find it weird how you do that. How you learn how to do things, be things and, well, how good you are at it.”

“What?” Eames was struggling to find a foothold in this conversation.

“Henry thinks you are his best friend. About two months ago he took me aside and very earnestly told me what a good man I had. Told me that you meant a lot to him. That you’re a really sound guy. But I know you think Henry is an arse.”

“He is an arse.”

“And Anton thinks you’re the only person who understands him. And Mora’s been in love with you since first year and I think Adrian probably is too, even if he hasn’t faced it yet. And that time when Julia heard her brother has AIDS and I thought you were amazing. She was so distraught and the way you said the right things and everything, when I really didn’t know what to do, and then when I started talking about it the next day, you couldn’t remember. You had completely forgotten. You can just turn it on for people and it doesn’t mean anything.”

“And?” said Eames, in growing frustration, watching Caroline’s hunched, defensive figure.

“You are friends with everyone. All sorts of people and it isn’t ... You can’t really like all of them. I know you don’t like half of them, you’ve told me ... and they love you.”

“But ... ” he didn’t really know what sort of objection was called for. “You don’t like my friends? That’s OK, I don’t like most of them. I can not see them. And I’m sorry about Julia. I’ll make more of an effort with your friends.”

“No!” Caroline was angry at him then. “That’s not the point! I don’t want you to not see the people I tell you not to see. I want you to only see the people you want to see. The people you really care about.”

Finally, Eames thought he could see a glimmer of light. “But it’s you. You’re the one I really care about. I’m sorry you think I’ve been wasting my time on other people.”

“No!” Caroline’s face had gone red and blotchy then and she had started struggling into her clothes, even though it was her room and if anyone was going to be leaving it had better be Eames.

“You don’t believe me,” said Eames, the truth finally dawning on him. “Just because I ... because I’m good with people. Because I’m good at saying the right thing.”

Caroline didn’t say anything. She’d finished dressing and was, it appeared, just coming to the awkward realisation that she was going to have to leave and leave Eames in her room and, what, tell him to take his stuff and go while she was away?

“I love you.” said Eames. He meant it and he tried as hard as he could to convey that. “Everything I’ve said to you has been true. I want this.” he gestured to the room, “and I want to go to Mongolia with you or … or whatever, whatever you want.”

“I’m sorry” said Caroline glumly, “but I can’t … . Those were good stories.”

“They were your stories” said Eames, angrily. “What? Did you think I’d used them before? Are you suggesting I use them again, so they don’t go to waste or something?”

“No,” said Caroline, weakly, though Eames could see there was more truth in what he’d said than not.

Eames flailed. This was all going wrong and he couldn’t work out how to salvage it. ‘Doing the right thing’ would be the wrong thing, he could see by Caroline’s face. She thought he was too slick, that he was running her in the way she observed him running everyone else, and as fast as he worked through options he could see her watching him think, watching him try desperately to calculate his next move and the longer he took the more certain he could see her becoming, certain that he was simply indexing through a flip file of ‘moves’ in his head. Eames had still tried to control his rising vexation.

“Caroline ... what can I do? I really don’t want ... can’t we ... I don’t know ...”. Then, desperate, he surged to his feet toward her, stopping short when he saw her recoil slightly, and he stood there, naked in the centre of the room, with the grey late-afternoon light filtering in through the curtains.

“I meant everything I said to you.”

And he had, at least it had meant a lot more than what he said most of the time, which counted as something for him. It had been whimsical, heedless and warm and he’d enjoyed it and now, for some insane reason, it was ruined.

“I’m sorry,” said Caroline, turning away from him. “Maybe you did, but you can see, can’t you, that it’s no good, now I have this in my head, I’m never sure any more and that’s stupid. I mean, it won’t work will it? With me doubting all the time and you trying to be genuine and ... look, I’m going to pop round to Sarah’s, just ... I’ll see you later, OK?” And she left. And Eames stood there.

After she had left, Eames had sat on the bed, struggling with his resentment, self-pity, and sense of betrayal. It made no sense to him. It was all just fucking messed up, he thought angrily. On top of it all, it was embarrassing. He’d made a big deal of his devotion to Caroline and now he was going to look like a fool. He pulled on his clothes and clattered down the stair and set out moodily across the quad.

As he slouched down Broad Street his mind and his stomach churned with the mess of it all. He was so caught up in himself, he didn’t notice Adrian till the fellow caught up with him and touched his shoulder.

“Hi, Eames. Hi, I … I just heard from Sarah. About you and Caroline. I’m really sorry, man,” said Adrian awkwardly, his hand tightening on Eames shoulder.

 _Bollocks, fuck! It’s because of aresholes like you …_ and without really considering what he was doing, he turned to Adrian, filling his eyes with bottomless anguish.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said brokenly and was gratified to see Adrian’s brows contract with intense concern.

“Oh Eames, _mate_!” Adrian breathed in sympathy, extending his arm protectively around his shoulders. “Maybe you’ll be able to fix things up …”.

“No! Oh God, Adrian, I just don’t …” and Eames allowed his voice to crack and his eyes to fill with tears. He let Adrian hustle him off the street, into quiet of the New College gardens and he didn’t know why, but projecting this exaggerated picture of heartbreak on to Adrian made him feel substantially less shit. It was also something of a salve to his pride that it took him all of four hours to get a protestingly straight Adrian into his bed.

Well, it wasn’t like he had any chance of patching things up with Caroline really. Every plan to ‘win her back’ was scuppered by its own effectiveness. It was his ability to do and say the right thing that she distrusted. So fuck it!

After Adrian, he slept with Anton, Mora and finally Sarah, which even he had to admit was a bit vindictive, and threw himself back into cultivating the social circles he’d neglected while he’d been wasting his time on Caroline.

***

 _II: London_

After university, Eames had got involved in a frankly ludicrous imports business, run by Henry. They imported silk shirts from China. Henry was convinced it was a sure thing.

Eames lived with Adrian in his apartment in South Kensington. They were sort of together, but also sort of not, as Adrian remained convinced that wanting to fuck Eames quite a lot didn’t actually make him gay, which was fine with Eames. The business folded in eighteen months, but Adrian gave Eames the money to cover his most pressing debts as he felt bad about using Eames’ unrequited love for him for meaningless sex. Eames however didn’t feel bad at all about using Adrian’s unrequited and sadly repressed love for him for money and meaningless sex. So that was all good.

London was good. London was fun. The dynamics shifted a bit from the Oxford days, but Eames was increasingly adept at keeping ahead of the flow. There were nightclubs and parties and hoards of new people and the not-relationship he had with Adrian didn’t preclude his sleeping around. After the shirt company went tits-up, he found a job as a bar manager at a west end club.

It was all right working in the club. You met a lot of different people. The same Sloaney yah crowds he knew from Oxford mixed with minor TV and sports celebrities and the ritzier end of the criminal fraternity. It wasn’t particularly demanding and in fact Eames was starting to get seriously bored when Terry, the club’s owner, brought in a new toy, for the entertainment of select clients. Something a contact of his had told him about after a trip to Japan. It was a PASIV, which everyone vaguely understood as some sort of black-market virtual-reality trip device. Eames and a couple of Terry’s other employees were instructed in the use of the thing and started offering lucid dream ’trips’ to club guests.

No one really knew how to use it. Following the instructions they had been given when Terry bought the thing they could manage rudimentary fantasy locations, flying above the clouds and so on, but Eames … Eames was fascinated. He understood frustratingly little of the device, or the complementary drugs they had been sold as necessary to the process, but by feeling his way, trying different things, he began to explore the possibilities. He quickly outpaced his colleagues in its use. He could go off-script, building new tailored experiences for individual clients and a more and more reliable ’trip’ experience.

His skills were soon in high demand among those who got to hear of them and after about five months he was poached by another even more select club. His loyalty to Terry had been non-existent anyway, but more than simply the prospect of more money, Aaron Karos boasted a genuine US-made PASIV, rather than the whatever, Korean knock-off device he’d learnt on at Terry’s.

One night, Aaron called him into his office. “Eames. I’ve got a friend coming in tonight, to go on the PASIV, Smithy. He’s Cavendish’s nephew. Now, the thing is. I am rather keen to find out if Smithy was in any way connected to that bit of trouble that went off down at the docks last Sunday. Of course, I can’t just ask. That would put me in an awkward position.”

 _Yeah_ , thought Eames, slouching in a chair opposite Aaron’s desk, though Aaron hadn’t asked him to sit down. _The sort of awkward position where he might tell Cavendish you were accusing him of things._

“You remember what you were saying last week?” went on Aaron. “About how stuff that someone was thinking about just before going under, that stuff sort of being there in the dream?”

Eames had started noticing this phenomena a few months back and had been informally experimenting, first by instructing customers to think consciously about the details of the fantasy they wanted, and finding this made for more fully fleshes out dreams, and later exploring the things people inadvertently revealed of their thoughts and preoccupations.

“I’d like you to see what you can find out about what Smithy knows about how news of that shipment got out,” Aaron ordered. “I’ll lay the ground work, talk with him about the raid and my ‘general’ concerns, then you see what you can do when you have him under. OK?”

“OK,” said Eames and Aaron smiled his big, gold-toothed, not-even-remotely-reaching-the-eyes smile.

“Good boy,” said Aaron, nodding his dismissal.

Smithy had wanted to be James Bond. Eames had set up the casino, the high stakes table, the pretty girl. He had kept scanning the projections Smithy brought with him, went through his pockets, trying to spot anything revealing. He tried throwing out a few leading questions, but Smithy didn’t appear to be sharing anything indicative of anything at all.

When Smithy had retired to his hotel room with not one, but two of the pretty girls, Eames had taken himself outside for a virtual smoke, somewhat miffed at having nothing useful to show to Aaron. Then he’d seen the Aston Martin. James Bond’s car. It was worth a look. It was, unsurprisingly, a bitch to break in to and Eames could already hear the strains of music signalling the dream was nearly up, when he finally got into the car and started rifling though the compartments in the dashboard. He’d found the expected high tec bits and bobs, but he’d also found a cheap mobile in a jiffy bag. Opening it up he’d quickly sent himself a text to find out the phone’s number and checked the last number called.

When he’d told Aaron later what he’d found, Aaron had been non-committal, but had murmured that he’d look into it. Three days later, Aaron gave Eames an envelope containing £3000.

“Merve traced those number for me,” said Aaron, by way of explanation. Seems likes much hunch was correct. That mobile was Smithy’s daughter’s. She’s got a new phone now. The other number, ‘David D’, was answered by an officer of the Metropolitan police. Pretty clear cut. Cavendish thought so too. Aaron smiled grimly and Eames concluded that he wouldn’t be seeing Smithy again any time soon.

It was a pretty good wheeze, scoping out the hiding places where people stored their personal secrets in dreams. Eames got into the habit of setting himself little challenges, dropping leading questions prior to starting the PASIV trip and tracking down the answers while they all dreamed. It at least kept him from getting bored.

A month or so later, he’d conducted a dream for some of Aaron’s favoured employees. They’d been in the dream of a guy called Pauli who managed a lot of Aaron’s security. Pauli liked horse-racing, so in the dream Eames had the guys set up as jockeys at the races. While they were all thundering around on improbably gigantic thoroughbreds, big enough to make 6’4” bouncers look small as jockeys, Eames had slipped into the jockey’s locker room and started cracking open the lockers.

Glen was cheating on his wife. Janis, the fucker, had the details for a secret selection of bank accounts that Eames didn’t know about. Eames had been creaming money out of the accounts of a judicious selection of his colleagues, but he’d known Janis was holding out on him. He’d got him now though, besides, as it looked like the cash going into these accounts was in fact Karos’s, Janis wouldn’t even be able to cry foul if it started to disappear.

Then Eames got to Pauli’s locker and found a locked cash box. He picked it open, and found, beneath the empty plastic change tray, a scratched tin pencil case with Spiderman on it. Within that he found a black cloth pouch. Increasingly intrigued, he opened that, only to discover a pair of wrist sweats.

 _What? Why is Pauli keeping a pair of sweat-bands hidden away like this? Wait … aren’t … aren’t those are mine? Seriously … Pauli!?!_

Pauli often spotted for Eames when he bench pressed the larger weights, joking about it being bad for business if he lost his grip and smashed his pretty face in. _But seriously_ … Eames was rather dumbstruck, _Pauli!?!_ Still, you never knew and, come to think about it, the extra levels of protection, hidden beneath so many layers, there was a chance that Pauli himself didn’t really know about this either.

Eames filed the information away. He certainly wasn’t going to act on it at once. Cracking on to Pauli, latent possessive desires or not, was pretty much certain to end in him getting his head staved in. Besides, he’d promised Aaron he wouldn’t sleep with any more of his employees, which meant not sleeping with anyone likely to get upset and make a fuss about it. Turning Pauli gay definitely didn’t come under the term, ‘flying beneath the radar’ on the liaison front.

It was the incident with Nelson that had torn things. Nelson had lost his shit about letting Eames suck him off, something to do with his Baptist upbringing, and had been collared by the police trying to climb the jump barriers on Suicide Bridge in Archway. They’d had to send him to stay with his sister in Ghana while he sorted himself out and Aaron had not been impressed and had called Eames into his office.

“You know, I don’t particularly give a shit about you being bent, Eames. But that is only so long as I don’t have to hear about it and deal with you getting my boys all upset. It was one thing when you were getting through the bar staff like they were fucking Jaffa Cakes or something, but this has got to stop!”

“Sorry, Mr Karos, I just get a bit carried away when I’m bored. It won’t happen again.”

“Bored! Jesus, Eames, I’ll buy you a fucking Playstation, now get the fuck out of my office and try and keep your dick in your pants for five fucking minutes, all right?”

“Yes, Mr Karos,” and Eames had slunk out, but he had taken Mandy from the kitchens home that night, because he was contrary like that, and also he knew Mandy would keep quiet about it.

*  
One unfortunate side effect of Eames’ success with the PASIV was that the Aaron became more and more interested in the process and started to wanting to oversee his jobs and have delusions of grandeur about assembling his own extraction team. It was one sharp poke in the eye short of being a fucking nightmare. Eames knew he should get out, Aaron was a blunt instrument: effective, but only at very short range, and he worked with some very dangerous people. On the other hand, Aaron was still the only guy he knew of with a machine like this. He couldn’t bear the idea of going back to Terry and sitting around bored out of his mind while celebrity footballers flew on ponies with wings over the Cheshire countryside.

It was true though, that pottering around in the subconscious of the criminal underworld was not always a fun or wholesome place to be. For years afterwards, one of Eames’ recurring nightmares was being stuck in the subconscious of a particularly repugnant drug-lord and trafficker whose projections all took the form of children. In these nightmares he would be set upon by these hostile little beings, torn apart, only to wake within the same dream, facing the same malevolent, vindictive little faces. It was while working for Aaron that Eames started to carry a gun, first in the PASIV and then out of it too. In the PASIV, Eames learnt it was sometimes infinitely preferable to shoot yourself in the head and get out than it was to hang around.

It was the pressure of keeping himself safe in close proximity to some sketchy shit that ultimately led Eames to discover his primary skill, his ability to forge other identities. He’d always used something like it in the real world, shifting his posture, tone and looks as far as he could to project the impression he wanted.

He had favoured personalities for different occasions. Since he’d been working for Aaron, with the accompanying increase in potentially violent altercations, the one he called on more and more was ‘Skye Jamie’. He was based on a chap from Skye he’d known at Oxford, one of Tim’s chess team buddies, who had had an almost preternatural lack of physical presence in a room. Jamie made Tim look charismatic and urbane. If you weren’t actually _talking_ to Jamie, you’d swear he wasn’t there. Eames tended concentrate on projecting this sort of wallflower quality whenever he’d found himself in situations involving angry men with guns. It had seemed to work. At least, he’d avoided getting shot.

The breakthrough occurred when he’d tried the same thing again in a dream. Glen, who’d been hosting the dream they were in had gone ballistic over something one of his fellow dreamers had argued with him about. Then he’d pulled a fucking shotgun out of nowhere (well, it was his dream). When the chemist, had raised his own gun to his temple, intending to get out of what was clearly a washed-up job, Glen had shot him in the gut, felling him to a writing screaming heap on the floor, but not dead enough to get him out of the dream. Glen was screaming that he would shoot the kneecaps off the next fucker to raise his gun and the situation was all kinds of fucked up.

Eames again tried to channel Jamie, to be the _last_ person that Glen’s psychotic fury would light upon, and saw this time, to his surprise, Jamie’s actual face reflected in the mirror opposite, rather than his own. No one seemed to have noticed the process of transformation and Eames was able to slink back unrecognised and unregarded among Glen’s projections, who were milling hostilely around them. Once out of sight, he shot himself in the head and woke. The light in the room of sleeping dreamers was low. Lissa, who was monitoring the PASIV looked up as his rose from his couch.

“There’s still five minutes,” she said, vaguely interrogatively.

“Run over by a fucking taxi, would you believe it!?” said Eames blithely, leaving the room before the rest of the dreamers woke and the gun pointing and shouting grew more real.

 _How fucking Brilliant was that?! Of course, of course!_ he crowed to himself in delight.

He ran over and over in his memory the mechanics of what happened, how it exercised some of the same technique of calling up props or setting up architecture, but melded with layers of volitional and instinctive projection of personality. He couldn’t wait to work at it some more.

And so Eames hung around. Working with criminals did have its advantages. There was a whole new skill-set to acquire, too. When it proved advisable to learn how to handle himself in a fight, a couple of Aaron’s guys had invited him round to the gym where they worked out and beaten the ever-living shit out of him in a friendly and informative way.  
Sparring had to be managed carefully. Trying to run a Saturday night in the club with one eye swollen shut and a nose that perpetually leaked pink-tinged mucus had not been joyous. Eames had pretty soon worked out that the more creative, ‘what to do when someone comes at you with a fire extinguisher’, type training sessions were better carried out in the PASIV, where apart from a certain stiffness from sympathetic muscle twinges, you didn’t carry your injuries over into the waking world.

‘Papers Willie’ was another find and Eames was happy to spend his Mondays, when the club was shut, pottering around in Willie’s workshop with him, learning some serious old-school forging. Of course the real money was in electronic and data fraud. Still, Eames enjoyed the old paper-based stuff and the essential principles of keeping one step ahead of the security infrastructure, and learning where you needed scrupulous fidelity and where people were likely to simply see what they assumed to be there was something that translated across all spheres of forging.

There were definitely disadvantages to his new lifestyle though. Getting shot in real life had been _bad_. He’d been walking home from the club, through South Ken, in the early hours of a Sunday morning when he had seen a white van cruising slowly into his peripheral vision. Something about it felt off – really, really off – and almost without conscious thought, Eames had veered up an alley opening to his right. Seconds later, pounding feet had confirmed his gut instinct. He sped up to a run, but a _ker-chic_ sound had ricocheted off the alley walls behind him, his lower left leg exploded in pain, and he crashed to the ground. Through the mist of pain that descended over him, he was half-aware of holding his breath in frozen anticipation of a second, more lethal shot. Looking back his vision managed to process a figure slipping back out of the alley mouth and away. His relief was quickly swamped by the full force of the pain in his leg. He rolled against the dirty alley wall as if seeking comfort from it and curled protectively in on himself.

 _Oh God_! he thought, _This is bad, this is really bad. Fuck, fuck, fuck!_

After some time, he had no idea how long, he’d realised that he was neither going to die of the pain, nor was it going to get any better on its own. He’d pulled out his phone and called Pauli. He knew it wouldn’t be appreciated if he called 999 and invited a whole lot of questions about why some strangers would want to take an unprovoked shot at him of a Sunday morning. Probably someone had got the wrong end of the stick and assumed he was involved in something he wasn’t or else it was a jab at Aaron, who had a real knack for pissing people off.

 _Fuck Aaron! Fuck all this shit. I’ve got to get out_ , Eames thought, as he lay waiting for Pauli to come and get him, _I could have been fucking killed._ He still could be killed, he realised, next time Aaron got on one of his empire-building kicks and started trampling all over other people’s criminal enterprises; next time he woke from some totally half-baked extraction with some narked subject pointing a gun at him. He needed to find a way out.

Well, finding a way out wasn’t difficult, he could just leave, disappear off somewhere, but what he needed was to find what it was he would disappear off _to_. He wasn’t one of those sad fucks who preferred to live in dream time, hooked to a PASIV, rather than the real world, but on the other hand, he knew he hadn’t begun to explore the potential it offered and he knew he was good, _really good_ , at working dreams.

Serendipitously, after his leg had mostly healed and before he had got around to tackling the question of what to try next, Aaron had called him into his office and told him enthusiastically about a new job, a serious one, a real big money client who was bringing in his own extractor to ensure the job got done.

The mark was a city broker, while the client was over from Frankfurt, from a branch office of the London firm. The Frankfurt guy had been less than scrupulously honest in disclosing the extent of losses made in the last couple of quarters. He wanted the codes of certain off-shore accounts administered in London by the mark. The client’s intention was to hive in money from them through the back door to temporarily pad out his diminished account books. It sounded like a shit plan to Eames, but the guy was certain he would make the money to cover it and move everything back to where it should be given just a couple of quarters’ grace. Whatever, the man was desperate enough to hang on to his credibility and was coming over with his own extractor to work the job on the mark’s home turf.

Eames had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t get sucked into any more of Aaron’s ill-conceived PASIV schemes, but this one sounded interesting. He wanted to see how an established professional worked. He didn’t know how good this German was, but he had to be better than the amateurs Eames worked with. A financier also didn’t sound like the sort of mark who would draw a gun on you if the dream collapsed on him. Eames had agreed to take part, on the condition that if the pro thought the job needed more than two people inside the dream he had to bring them himself. As it turned out, the pro brought an architect, Shachar, with him and Lissa handled the sedation.

Eames’ role was based on his new skills at impersonating people within dreams, which he’d been cultivating assiduously. In this case, the plan was based on the intelligence that the mark was shortly planning to propose to his girlfriend. The Frankfurt client was to meet him in London. They would visit the nightclub and he would bring discussion round to the security of the offshore accounts at which point the mark would be drugged and the dream would commence.

Shachar had designed a dreamspace around a luxury London restaurant the mark was fond of and the dream started with the mark at the bar there. Eames, eager to show off his skills to Fredrik – the pro – was going to impersonate a friend of the mark, teasing him about the proposal and whether or not he had managed to keep his intentions a secret from his girlfriend, focusing the mark’s attention on the ring he had been covertly carrying around for months.

Eames was then to reappear as the girlfriend, joining the mark for a meal. Once the presence of the ring had been established as the central focus, Eames would endeavour to nudge the mark into giving it to him or, failing that, Fredrik who would appear as a waiter and lift the ring off the mark.

It sounded a funny sort of plan to Eames and once he’d met Fredrik, exceedingly tall, with dark blond slicked-back hair, a sharp, conservative suit and attitude to match, he’d been puzzled about why someone so seemingly professional would want to work with enthusiastic amateurs like Aaron. He had smothered his misgivings though, in anticipation of working in an expertly designed dreamspace, and with the intense desire of impressing on these cool-eyed Germans that, although Aaron’s organisation might be a bit shonky, his skills most certainly were not.

The job started off perfectly. From the sheen of starched table cloths to the glittering cityscape of London visible through the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows on three sides of the restaurant, the set-up was faultless. Slipping into the guise of Nick, one of the subject’s drinking buddies, Eames lurched up behind him and ruffled his hair.

“Daaaaaave, mate!” he cried, striving to be as irritating as possible. The mark turned to him, looking gratifyingly annoyed.

“Oh, hi Nick.”

“Mate! You’re looking pretty spiffy – you meeting Katie here? Very nice, very classy joint!” Eames continued to crowd him. “Are you finally going to take your balls in both hands and pop the old question, mate? You still labouring under the delusion that Katie doesn’t know?” he rattled on, “Man, I swear Karen must have been monitoring my credit card bills or something. I’d only had the damn ring in my possession like a day or something before she’d been through all my drawers and found it at the bottom of my golf bag!”

“Nick!” huffed the mark, indignantly.

“Fret not, my man! I will not spoil your elaborate plan, delusion though it be! I’ll give you a grand though,” he called over his shoulder, walking away, “if Katie doesn’t confess afterwards that she saw the ring months ago and has been waiting for you to get your arse in gear ever since!”

The mark frowned at him as he left, his hand hovering protectively over his left jacket pocket. Sweet!

The next stage of the job was more challenging. The mark was protective of the ring and they couldn’t just wrest it off him. They’d need to distract him, or even better, prompt him into giving it up. Passing himself off as Katie was also going to be a nice opportunity of demonstrating just how damn good he was. Eames had studied photographs and video footage of the girl for a week, including footage of her and the mark together. He was convinced he could make it work, in fact, he was going to rock this!

Slipping into the Katie body and mind, Eames circled back around the bar. He’d gone for a more dressed-up look than a meal out, even somewhere swanky, usually warranted. He was going to have to do everything he could to signal to the mark that tonight was the special night. He hoped Fredrik was watching. Shachar had done a great job, too, everything in the place was running on ball-bearings, the mark’s favourite music hanging in the air.

The mark was still antsy and tense from his interaction with Nick, so Eames had to calm him down first, stroking his hand across the table, smiling sweetly at him and thanking him for being taken out.

“I do love this place,” he breathed, turning to look out over the twinkling lights and pink-tinged horizon of the London skyline. Shachar was clearly something of a romantic at heart.

“I know you do, sweetheart”, the mark said gruffly, clearing his throat and shrugging off his bad temper. Eames played Katie and Katie played the mark perfectly. A few glasses of wine down, her cheeks prettily pink and her eyes sparkling, she laughed and flirted and the mark basked in her attention.

“Viola asked if we would be able to go out to her house in Brittany next summer? She and Giles reckon it will take another nine months to finish the restoration, but then we really have to go and see it.”

“Well, darling, that depends” said the mark, clearing his throat nervously, “you might be a bit busy next summer with other things,” and he started to fish around in his pocket.

 _Oh score! Fucking score!_ Eames crowed in his head. “Busy next summer?” he said, puzzled, looking on quizzically as the mark withdrew something from his pocket and stood up to move round the table and kneel beside Katie.

Fifteen minutes later, with mascara tracks striped down his cheek (well, it’s an emotional event for a girl) Eames slipped into the bathroom with the ring, which bore, in place of its hallmark, the security codes that locked down the Bermuda accounts the client was after. Fredrik was waiting there and Eames happily shifted back into his own form, grinning and proffering the ring.

He’d always enjoyed shifting in front of the others, especially from a woman’s form. The confusion and revulsion that showed on their faces, even when they had known it was him was always priceless. Si tended to go a bit green as he tried to process that the woman he’d been ogling (Si ogled _all_ women) was actually Eames. Fredrik’s reaction was a bit more … positive. His serious eyes had glittered and he’d advanced on Eames, backing him into a cubicle.

“Yes, Mr Eames, you are indeed as good as you think you are”, he’d murmured, pressing Eames up against the cubicle wall. _Well, that’s a bit unexpected_ , thought Eames, _I guess I was focussing a bit too much on the slick professional attitude and missed that bit._ He’d smiled lazily at Fredrik, whose face was inches away from his own.

“Too good, I think, to be working for such a low-class organisation. You shouldn’t be working with such criminals, Mr Eames. It is a waste of your talents,” Fredrik continued, running a hand lightly over Eames’ lapel. “You could get shot, for instance.” The knowing light in Fredrik’s hooded eyes left Eames in no doubt that he was aware of the finer points of his career to date.

“I’ve been meaning to make a move,” he replied somewhat hoarsely. What was it about sharp, controlled guys when they warmed up that got to him so much?

“I might be able to help with that,” said Fredrik, sliding his knee between Eames’ legs. “So, then, I want you to stay here till the dream concludes. It should only be ten minutes or so. After that, perhaps, look me up in Frankfurt.” And with that he had kissed him hard, then pulled a handgun from under his jacket and shot himself in the head.

 _Well … fuck. What was that about?_ Eames thought. _Stay in the dream. What? Wait a second._ Full of suspicion, Eames hesitated for a second then went for his own gun and exited the dream.

In the low light of the private room of the club, it took Eames a couple of seconds to process what he could see, which was the mark lying dead, still hooked up to the PASIV, shot through the head. Lissa lay slumped, breathing stentoriously, dark blood seeping down her neck from the back of her head which rested against the wall. Fredrik and Shachar were gone.

 _Fuck! What? Fuck!_

The first clear thought to strike Eames was that is hadn’t been a real job. He’d been bothered all along by the question of why a professional like Fredrik want to work with an amateur team instead of bringing in all his own guys? Well, perhaps the answer was because it wasn’t an extraction, it was a … a hit.

A hit hidden behind a front provided by Aaron and his extraction ambitions. It was Aaron’s guys who’d done the surveillance on the mark and his girlfriend. The whole thing had his fingerprints all over it. This hit was going to be pinned on Aaron. Whoever had called it, whatever they had been after, and they were clearly something big perhaps even semi-legit in Frankfurt. The question Eames had been asking, or more pertinently, failing to ask, would shout out loud and clear to anyone investigating the matter: that there was no way that a distinguished financial organisation would go with a crew like Aaron’s. They would conclude, therefore, it wasn’t a Frankfurt job, it was a local job and Aaron had simple bumped off some local city boy for reasons of his own.

Fuck! It wasn’t only Aaron – his fingerprints were all over this too! _Look me up in Frankfurt,_ yeah right, after he served time for the shooting that Fredrik had carried out. Eames dropped his head in his hands, fuck, it even sounded like a fantasy to him too, ‘there were these two German guys, professionals, they planned everything …’

Right, well he wasn’t going down without a fight. Fredrik was right about one thing – he was too damn good to get taken down with a bunch of sad-arse, small-time gangsters like Aaron’s gang. He was going to get the fuck out of here and the first thing he was going to do was have a crack at tracking down Fredrik.

They’d had a final planning meeting the previous night at what was ostensibly Fredrik and Shachar’s hotel. Something hadn’t felt right about the suite and Eames had taken the liberty of lifting Fredrik’s wallet and had noted a receipt for dinner the previous evening at another London hotel, a receipt time-stamped at 10:47. This suggested the possibility now, when his head wasn’t all puffed up with how fucking awesome he was going to be and how much he was going to blow Fredrik’s mind with his natural forging prowess, that Fredrik was indeed staying at this other hotel.

Right, he needed to move fast. Someone might be bright enough to keep the discovery of the mark’s body quiet, on the other hand if it was one of the barmaids who found him, it wouldn’t take long for a formal investigation to get underway. Chances were that Fredrik and Shachar were already on their way to the airport. Still … he headed first to the main office and took as much cash as he could carry from the safe and a handgun.

“What’s going on, Eames?” It was Pauli, standing in the door, in his bouncer’s black and white tux.

“Shit is hitting fan, darling. Shit is hitting fan and I’m getting out of here.”

“Is that Karos’s money? I don’t think I should let you take that.” Pauli shifted his stance into an impenetrably muscled mass that you’d be ready to believe could stop a speeding car.

“Believe me, he won’t care,” and Eames stepped lightly into Pauli’s personal space and kissed him enthusiastically on the lips. Without waiting to properly gauge his stunned response, he skipped past him and began to take the stairs two at a time. He briefly thought about yelling up to Pauli to go check on Lissa, but, well, he was going to need all the time he could get.

Outside he hailed a black cab and took it round to the hotel named on the receipt. As the cab drew up he saw the back of Shachar’s head disappearing into the passenger seat of a sleek Mercedes parked on the hotel forecourt. Bunging a handful of notes over the cab drivers shoulder, Eames sprinted for the car, pulled open the far side passenger door and slid in.

“I was missing you already, so I thought, what the hell, you only live once. I’ve decide to take you up on your offer.”

“Oh?” said Fredrik coolly, waving off the driver’s interrogative, ‘shall I kick this youth out of your car, sir?’ glance and motioning him to pull away from the kerb. “What offer was that?”

“That I come to Frankfurt with you. Get on into your line of work. Get to know you better. Or were you just spinning me a line so you could have your wicked way with me?” said Eames, smiling suggestively.

“My wicked way with you?” queried Fredrik. Well, at least he hadn’t just opened the passenger door and rolled him into moving traffic.

“Well, it certainly felt like I’d been thoroughly fucked when I woke up just now,” said Eames, letting just a hint of the anger he felt glitter in his voice. Shachar snorted.

Fredrik’s lips pursed into a pleased, contemplative pout, “well, I suppose I was right, you really are too good an … asset … to let you go now. You found our hotel, which indicates you are not as completely naïve as you otherwise appear. I suppose you do not have the, ah, appropriate papers for travel, though?” And really, this being patronized was fucking irritating, but when your choice is being on your own with about £500 in cash, a handgun and a warrant out for your arrest and being all those things in a Mercedes with two German career criminals about to whisk you off to foreign parts, well you were better off making the best of it.

“I haven’t got a passport or anything of the kind on me just now. I’ve got about five hundred quid in cash, a hand gun and,” Eames leaned confidentially towards Fredrik, “I suck cock like you would _not_ believe,” he said enunciating carefully to send hot puffs of breath over Fredrik’s ear and neck and he settled back, flinging an arm behind Fredrik along the creaking leather upholstery of the back seat and staring out of the window. Well, brazen had worked for him before.

***

 _III: Frankfurt_

In Frankfurt, Eames lived with Fredrik, who actually turned out to be called Stefan. He had a handsome three-bedroom flat in the centre of town and Eames occupied one room, though he mostly slept with Stefan when he was in town. He had his own room so that he could keep his general disorder out of Stefan’s way. Stefan liked to keep things neat and when he came back after an out of town job, Eames would hear his exclamation of _Mein Gott!_ And then the punch tones of his phone as he called the clean-up people, who usually specialised in the blood-splatter end of the domestic market, but could also be prevailed upon to deal with what Eames did to an apartment when he had been left on his own and bored for a week.

Working with Stefan, Eames got access to a whole new level of jobs – people who really knew what they were doing and knew the apparatus of dreams like the back of their hands. He noticed there was an odd tendency in the industry for people like Stefan: orderly and unimaginative, exactly the opposite to the sort of people you’d expect to run dreams. Perhaps it was their tight grasp on the purely theoretical mechanics of how things were supposed to work that enabled them to negotiate the slippery slopes of the unconscious world. Eames was more of a natural. _Wunderkind_ , he liked to suggest to Stefan because of the way it made him roll his eyes.

Stefan was a pernickety bugger, but he was a fairly big player in the extraction game and had the contacts Eames needed. In addition, he was quite fit and his uptight nature offered endlessly entertaining possibilities for the button-pressing Eames liked to spring on him.

One evening, Stefan returned from a job and by the thump of the door, Eames knew it hadn’t gone well. Instead of the semi-affectionate exasperation at the state of the apartment, Stefan began a stream of expletives under his breath. Kicking some of the detritus aside, he had marched into the kitchen where he started sweeping dirty crockery and glasses into the sink, not caring what smashed.

Eames pulled his t-shirt off over his head (well, it sounded like he was going to need any advantage he could get) and went to lean against the kitchen doorway. Stefan’s face was pinched and furious and a spray of blood spatters was visible over the white cuff of his shirt and across his hand.

 _A messy job then. Goodo!_

Eames liked to set himself little challenges, one of which involved attempting to distract Stefan with sex when he was least in the mood for it. Eames stayed still in the doorway, but stared hard at Stefan until he turned away from the sink and faced him. The secret with Stefan was not to initiate conversation. When it came to wielding words, even in a second language, Stefan knew exactly what he was doing. On the level of his rational mind, he couldn’t be fucked with. If you kept thing basic though, sub-linguistic, you could tap into his emotional responses, which he was much less adept at controlling.

“You are a pig!” Stefan said, cold and furious.

Eames maintained the eye contact established, letting his eyes fill with heat. Still not speaking, he sank slowly to his knees in the doorway. He continued to gaze fixedly up through his lashes, neither penitent nor overtly challenging. He let the intensity of the moment build. Rewarded by the flaring of Stefan’s nostrils, he adjusted his posture slightly, parting his lips and pushing out his chest, shifting the signals from _if you want me,_ to _you want me._ As if against his own volition, Stefan stalked forwards to stand in front of Eames.

Eames kept his eyes locked on Stefan’s and waited to see if Stefan would initiate anything. Seeing him hesitate, he caught up Stefan’s blood-stained hand and thrust two fingers into his mouth and began to suck them clean. Which wasn’t very sanitary, really, but, in the heat of the moment, Eames tended to go with what he knew would work, rather than what was sensible. And it did work. A shudder ran through Stefan’s entire frame and he began combing his free hand compulsively through Eames’ hair muttering a stream of something presumably filthy in Plattdeutsch. Eames smiled to himself and sucked Stefan’s fingers down to the knuckle.

*

All in all, Frankfurt was working out very well for Eames. He loved the work, the intricacy and the variety of it. The teams he worked with were serious, they put in serious planning and best of all, after not too long, they took Eames seriously too. He worked jobs based around Frankfurt, Brussels and The Hague: finance, corporate and political. Most of the clients, marks and teams wore suits. If you were going to move in these worlds a suit was a necessary part of the armoury. Young men, making pots of money; there were a lot of nice suits going around, but Eames found, after a bit, that a sharp suit was more trouble than it was worth. A sharp suit said ‘Look at me’, ‘take me seriously’, ‘I am a sharp guy’. When you are trying to steal a chap’s wallet or tail him, the last thing you need is a suit saying ‘hey, check out my arse!’

Instead, Eames dressed to be dismissed as quickly as possible, as someone unworthy of close attention. When his dapper colleagues teased him, he’d simply grin at them. It wasn’t like being dressed like an absentminded school teacher or uni student ever stopped him pulling. The gig he had going with Stefan was pretty flexible. At least, Stefan was out of town a lot and Eames knew how to be circumspect.

As Eames’ skills as a forger grew better known on the circuit, it became more profitable to freelance with different teams, looking for his specialist skills, than to work with Stefan’s team all the time. It was on a freelance basis that Eames got to work with Cobb’s team for the first time. He was pretty excited actually. Cobb was a big name on the extraction circuit.

The job was to be carried out on a high-ranking Russian diplomat attending a UN Security Council meeting in Bonn. Like many figures in his position, his subconscious was known to be militarized so any attack on him was a high-risk procedure. Cobb and his team were considered among the few who could reliably be brought in against such odds. Bringing in a skilled forger was another way of levelling the playing field and confusing the subject’s self-defence systems.

Eames’ first meeting with the team was in the HQ they had set up in a vacant floor of a commercial office building close to the administrative centre. Eames had been warned about Cobb’s fabulously beautiful wife but his first thought on introduction to the team was astonishment that no one had thought to mention Cobb’s delicious twink point-man. Aware he was meeting his boss’ wife and … what? … wedding present to his wife? … wedding present _from_ his wife? Anyway, he had toned down his smile from ‘leering’ to ‘openly appreciative’.

“This is Mal, my wife,” Cobb said redundantly, “who will be building for us on this job.” Eames stepped forward and took her proffered hand and, what the hell, even if he was impressed by the Cobbs, he wasn’t going to tiptoe around them, so he kissed it and murmured “Enchanté, Madame” with his best loveable-rogue smile.

“Mr Eames,” Mal had huffed in wry amusement and nodded in response.

“This is Arthur, my point-man,” Cobb had gone on. For a brief, wild moment, Eames had considered kissing Arthur’s hand, too, but had cautioned himself that there was no need to let the situation go completely to his head. Judging by Arthur’s stony face, he hadn’t appreciated Eames playing up to Mal even to the restrained degree that he had.

“Arthur,” Eames had said, in a friendly-but-business-like manner, sticking out his hand.

“Mr Eames,” Arthur had said, taking his hand and shaking it. Both his handshake and intonation were completely neutral and yet still managed to convey disdain.

“I think you know Richard, here. He’s going to be handling the chemistry and monitoring things while we are under,” said Cobb finishing his introductions.

Richard and Eames nodded at one another. Richard was a perfectly adequate chemist. His compounds were always one hundred per cent reliable, though nothing inventive, and he didn’t go into the field at all. Eames found him deathly dull, which meant he was expunged entirely from his consciousness from one job to the next.

“Richard, my man! How are you doing?” Eames called across to him, warmly. Richard’s ears went pink and he mumbled something. _Oh yeah, he does that_ , remembered Eames and then forgot him again.

Eames had somehow expected Cobb himself to be a bit more immediately impressive than he was. It was only after the first week of preparing for the job that Eames began to see just how he had built up such a stellar reputation. Cobb knew the world of the subconscious better than anyone Eames had worked with before and he didn’t just work a job, he _played_ it. He relied on intuition and instinct in a manner similar to Eames.

Cobb’s self-awareness and familiarity with the dream state, however, allowed for the development of meticulous planning to back him up, which was where Arthur came in. So it wasn’t like Cobb was winging it, rather that he knew when a tweak was needed or when the plan would have to be deviated from well before any indication Eames could see that anything was up. It wasn’t just Cobb though, it was the team he collected around him. Mal and he seemed able to read each other’s minds, so Cobb’s playing around with the plan was effortlessly communicated to his teammates without the slightest hiccup.

Arthur was undoubtedly, Eames concluded, the most anal, details-obsessed, micro-planner that he had ever met – in an industry dominated by methodical and obsessive perfectionists. Stefan only owned clothes in shades of blue and shoes in shades of brown. Arthur, Eames had no doubt, had a precise cataloguing system for his shirts, ties, suits and waistcoats and an algorithm for what went with what. Not that Eames was complaining, the effect was very pleasing.

It had quickly become apparent why unremarkable Richard had been chosen as the chemist for the job and why he did not go into the field. Richard’s subconscious was militarized, so he provided the practice ground for the team’s manoeuvres.

For such an introverted, mumbly guy, his subconscious was taking no prisoners. The set-up was the forests around the subject, Mikhail’s, weekend dacha outside Nizhny Novgorod. The plan was a pretty simple one, as hanging around for any length of time in this chap’s mind was not going to be an option. Mal was going to pick him up under the guise of being a fellow guest at the hotel he was staying at. Once alone in his hotel room it would be time for the old knock-out drops and the others would join her and get in and out in about 15 minutes. Eames, in the form of the mark’s brother, Ilya, would guide the mark to his dacha. They would hole up there, under attack from Mikhail’s projections, who would be besieging the dacha to get at Mikhail and end the dream.

Cobb reckoned it would be pretty easy, in such high-pressure circumstances, to get the mark to reveal where he had hidden his secret. Eames would provide distraction, while the rest of the team worked the extraction.

Romping through the scrubby pine forest of Richard’s subconscious under light-arms fire was pretty exhilarating. The rest of the team were to press ahead in an armoured personnel carrier to get ensconced in the dacha before Eames and Mikhail arrived. It was Eames’ familiarity with Russian traditions in military tactics and manoeuvres in particular that was to give him the advantage he needed on this job, to get them and Mikhail safely into the dacha.

When militarization of the subconscious had come in about two years ago, as a response to the growing awareness of extraction practice, Eames had gone with some of his colleagues to Siberia to train in various assault techniques that would give them the know-how they’d need to deal with the escalating levels of violence. A military commander whose brother worked in extraction – and who therefore understood that he was training them to run amok in the minds of businessmen and gangsters, rather than the real world – had been happy to take them on. In return for a substantial supplement to his legitimate pay-cheque, he had spent six weeks teaching them how to use every piece of kit they had and take them through as many different attack scenarios as he could think of.

Running scenarios in Richard’s subconscious wasn’t quite the same, as he hadn’t received the Russian military training that Mikhail had. Nevertheless, in between his own research into Ilya, Eames coached the rest of the team on the attack formations likely to be mobilized through Mal’s forest maze.

Eames enjoyed it and it meant he got to play with the armoured personnel carrier, which he wouldn’t actually get to use during the job. All he and Mikhail would get would be hunting rifles, as he felt that the dream would be critically destabilized if, on top of embedded militarization, Mikhail had to reconcile himself to the unusual idea that his brother and he had come out to the dacha for the weekend armed to the teeth with rocket launchers and grenades.

Eames made the most of things, coaching Cobb on tactics and showing Mal (more times than strictly necessary) how to use the vehicle-mounted rocket launcher and machine gun. Arthur didn’t approve, it appeared, of people who enjoyed blowing things up. His sense of neatness seemed to be offended by anything but the most precise and outcome-appropriate use of force.

“Jesus Eames! Sledgehammer to crack an egg!” he had sighed exasperatedly when Eames had set half the forest ablaze with his enthusiastic loosing of rockets.

“That analogy only works if you actually want to eat the eggs. If you just want to smash them and you have a sledgehammer to hand, why not use it, instead of going at them with a teaspoon?” Eames had grinned at him through the acrid smoke.

Arthur had simply frowned at him and told him to get the fuck on with it, then. Eames just couldn’t get Arthur. He gave off an intense air of irritation whenever he was around Eames, without manifesting it in any conspicuous way. He didn’t roll his eyes or huff and puff, he simply managed to convey through his level, flat looks and pointed silences, that yet again Eames had confirmed Arthur’s estimation that he was an arsehole.

Eames didn’t particularly care that Arthur thought he was an arsehole, he was just a little puzzled as to why. It wasn’t that it was unheard of for people to think Eames was a cunt, it was just much less common of people whom he had made an effort to charm. Without being obsequious, Eames had tried to fit into Cobb’s team. Cobb got seriously interesting work and Eames wanted to work with him again. So he made it his business to be at his most likeable. And while he might well be a bit of a cunt, he knew he was a very, very likeable one, as his increasingly easy relationship with Dom and Mal confirmed.

With Arthur though, he cut no ice. Probably it was some other issue, a problem with sharing Dom and Mal or perhaps he’d wanted to work with someone else, some other forger, and Dom had overruled him and he was piqued. They just didn’t gel. Eames found Arthur’s second-guessing of him and duplication of his own research, ‘just to keep tabs on everything’ a source of considerable annoyance. Arthur seemed to find _everything_ about Eames a source of considerable annoyance.

“Did you actually walk through the public streets dressed in that shirt?” he’d said by way of greeting, when Eames arrived one morning.

“Actually, I rode the tram, but essentially, yes, I did. You don’t like?” Eames had replied, sketching a twirl.

Arthur had given him that increasingly familiar look of extreme unimpressedness coupled with a complete lack of surprise that Eames had yet again proven himself to be an unmitigated arse. “Did no one ever tell you never to wear pink with peach, Mr Eames?”

“Weeeell, they might have done,” Eames had replied, dropping into one of the wheely chairs and starting to revolve slowly.

Arthur had already turned back to his laptop and was ignoring him. Eames _hated_ it when he did that: just took Eames into his consciousness long enough to censure him, before dismissing him from his thoughts entirely. So Eames had trundled up to him in his chair, nudging into Arthur.

“In the interests of full disclosure, Arthur,” he began, shunting Arthur slightly away from his desk. “I am a thief, a liar, a whore …” Arthur raised his eyebrow slightly at this. “Well, how do you imagine forgers ‘distract’ the mark most of the time?” Eames had asked, but went on without allowing Arthur a pause. “I’m a murderer. At least,” he qualified, “I shot a couple of guys when the team I was working with was jumped by a rival team, and I didn’t stop to check how they did afterwards. I’m a forger, a sodomite, I’ve committed perjury and tax evasion and I have over forty unpaid parking tickets owing to Edinburgh City Council alone. Oh, and I cheat at cards. In fact I cheat in nearly all circumstances. And I wear pink with peach. And sometimes orange and purple. And sometimes I even wear them all at once. With a baseball cap,” Eames finished.

Throughout this monologue Arthur had stared at him with the same calm flat look and faint furrow to his brow as if his was just slightly bored.

“I’m thinking of getting a gold tooth.”

That look was starting to drive Eames completely up the wall. He had scooted his chair a couple of inches closer, sliding between Arthur’s legs and kissed him, quickly on the lips.

“Oh, and I make completely inappropriate and unprofessional sexual advances on people.” Eames wheeled away and sat back grinning to see how Arthur would take it.

Arthur wasn’t looking bored now. Without any of his features apparently shifting, his steady gaze was now infused with an intensity that Eames couldn’t quite name, but it definitely wasn’t warm.

“How many times have you been shot, Mr Eames?” Arthur asked levelly.

“In real life? Just once.” Eames had replied.

“That, Mr Eames, is _fucking_ amazing.” Arthur had blinked slowly. “If you want to maintain that enviable state of affairs, I suggest, _strongly_ , that you don’t try and do that again. Do you understand me?”

“Rightio!” Eames had responded brightly, scooting back across to the floor to his own workstation.

*

As they couldn’t be sure how the projections would behave, Mal had devised a number of routes through the maze. After the first week they started to run the scenario with two armoured vehicles, racing each other to the dacha, to ensure maximum familiarity with all possible route variations. Eames was driving the first vehicle with Arthur covering their defence, while Dom drove the second and Mal fought off their attackers.

Churning over the uneven terrain with the rattle of Arthur’s fire in his ears, Arthur and Eames heard an almighty crash crackle through their two-way radios. This wasn’t the first time that Richard’s projections had got lucky and taken one or two of them out. This time though, instead of silence, they heard Mal’s agonized screaming, tinny sounding. Eames hissed through his teeth, nasty, and kept ploughing through the scrub forest towards the dacha, only to have Arthur leap down from his gun, yelling at him and wrestling him for control of the vehicle.

“Fuck _off_!” yelled Eames, annoyed, elbowing Arthur in the face and regaining control of the vehicle, only to have Arthur draw his machine pistol and shoot him in the head. Eames woke to the sound of Mal retching and Cobb murmuring reassuringly to her whilst Richard babbled apologies on the behalf of his subconscious. Eames was too pissed off to wait for Arthur to make his way out of the dream and so kicked over his chair.

Arthur woke and immediately leapt from the floor, clearly furious, and started yelling at Eames. “What the _fuck_ , Eames!? It was a fucking exercise! On what planet is it OK to leave a team mate behind while they sustain massive psychological trauma just so you can win a fucking race!?! You fucking shit, couldn’t you hear her screaming!?!”

“Hey, back off, boyo!” Eames shouted back. “Yes, I heard her, and no, I wasn’t going to do anything about it. For one thing, we run scenarios as live, that is what we agreed and that is what I’d have done on the job. For another thing, Cobb was with Mal, so I assumed he’d have taken care of her. For a final point, _fuck-wit_ , militarized projections have a single objective, to eject all interlopers from the dream as quickly as possible. They’d have finished her off before we even got close.” Eames finished, shoulders thrown back and nose-to-nose with Arthur.

“You just don’t understand, do you?” Arthur sneered at him. “Fuck!” he exclaimed turning away. “I _hate_ working with forgers. I told you, Dom. They’re all fucking sociopaths. You can’t rely on their judgement. They are pathologically incapable of acting like normal human beings except when they are _pretending to be someone else_!”

“You know what you can do, Arthur? You can take your ‘human decency’ and shove it up your arse!” Eames yelled back at him. “I thought we were here to get a job done. That’s certainly why I’m here and …”

“Guys, _guys_!” Cobb shouted over the top of them. “Shut up and calm down. We’re taking the rest of the day off. No, it’s OK Mal, we’re on top of things. Let’s all just take the day, calm down and get on with things tomorrow.”

“Fucking fine! See you all tomorrow.” Eames snapped, grabbing up his jacket and swinging past Arthur, who seemed to be paralysed between wanting to shout at Eames some more, go and comfort Mal and apologise to Cobb for losing his cool.

Despite the upsets, the job didn’t go too badly in the end. Mikhail turned out to be seriously nervy, so on top of the projections, who went at it with the expected enthusiasm, the dream was profoundly unstable. Having made it into the dacha, Eames-as-Ilya had managed to prompt Mikhail into revealing his secret place, but the earth-tremors and jumping crockery made him doubt whether the others would get to it before the dream collapsed entirely. Grumbling to himself under his breath, Eames had explained to Mikhail that he wanted to see if there were more attackers coming from the lake, and silhouetted himself in the window long enough to get shot through the shoulder. Watching his little brother bleed slowly to death in his arms provided Mikhail with the consuming psychological focus necessary to stabilize the dream for the short period of time they needed.

Eames was profoundly grateful, though, when Cobb had rounded the living room door and shot him through the temple.

“Aw, Christ!” groaned Eames, rolling up into a sitting position. “Ow! I’m getting too old for this shit!” he said with all the intense world-weariness of a twenty-six-year-old, rubbing at the phantom pain in his shoulder.

Cobb laughed. “Good job Eames. I thought we were going to lose the whole shooting match. That dacha was shaking apart.”

“Yep, Mikey here is one jittery bugger,” replied Eames, nudging Mikhail’s still-sleeping form with his foot.

“Ok, clean up and let’s get out of here, guys,” said Cobb turning to watch Arthur who was already reeling the lines back into the PASIV case. “Good job everyone, let’s go!”

“Good job, Eames,” said Arthur, grudgingly, as Eames passed him exiting the hotel room.

It was so cute watching Arthur struggling against his better judgement to be fair with him, that Eames decided in that moment not to hold that earlier ‘sociopath’ comment against him.

“Anytime, sweetpea!” he replied, turning to throw Arthur a cheesy wink as he hefted his bag over his shoulder and left.

***

 _IV: Houston_

The Russian training that Eames and the rest of Stefan’s team had undergone had been fortuitous in more ways than one, leading to a lucrative side-line in service to the Russian oligarchy. Eames had been on his way back from Moscow when he’d got the call about his next job for Cobb. Cobb was pretty conservative about his team and who he worked with and he didn’t call in a forger just for the fun of it so, despite Eames’ stellar work on the Mikhail job, it was about six months before he heard from Cobb again. _Well_ , he rationalized, _at least it means that little shit, Arthur, hasn’t got his way about never employing me again._

This time, the job was over in the US, a commercial, rather than a political secret. The mark was a Jon Doukakis, who the client wanted tapped for the merger and acquisition plans his firm was developing. Preliminary research into the job had revealed that Doukakis was a particularly cautious and conservative individual. He was not militarized because he had refused to allow company-sanctioned professionals into his mind. His company had put considerable pressure on him, but he’d remained adamant. On one hand, this made the job easier, but on the other, a strong-minded and stubborn subject was always a challenge.

The team assembled in Houston, in a workshop in a light-industrial complex not far from where Doukakis’ headoffice was based. Mal wasn’t with them this time, as she was just weeks away from giving birth to her and Dom’s first child. Dom was going to build and they were going to bring in one of their usual US-based chemists, once they’d narrowed down what the job was likely to need. Arthur immediately began to fill Eames in on their preliminary research into the mark, his business and his habits, with only the briefest of initial glances to convey what he thought of Eames’ Hawaiian shirt. Whatever, it was fucking hot in Houston in the summer.

As what they were after was qualitative, rather than straightforward quantative information, they decided to go for extortion, rather than the hidden secret method. The more complex and extensive the ideas to be extracted, the greater the danger that the hidden object would be incomplete, as the subject had no psychological need to hide anything other than the salient key to the stream of ideas that were already familiar to him. In cases like this, it was better to pressure the subject into participating actively in the extraction. Eames did a lot of work like this, because the consistent effectiveness of threatening injury to loved ones rested on the forger’s ability to assume the form of the beloved.

He’d seen immediately that Arthur and Cobb were right, the amount of detail that the client was after would be more reliably extracted with the subject’s cooperation. The downside of this method, as with all extraction under duress, was that the subject had the opportunity to dissemble or refuse to cooperate altogether. The effectiveness of the forge and the desire of the subject to protect the loved one was central to the fidelity of the information retrieved. In a worst-case scenario, where the information retrieved seemed dubious in any way, they either had to go into a second dream layer to test it or they had to manage a follow-up extraction to pull a secret object that could then be tested against the statements extracted in the first job. All in all, it was best to get an accurate statement in the first shot.

Doukakis had a wife and two sons and was well-known for his commitment to family values and his good marriage. They agreed that it seemed likely his wife would be a prime figure through which to attack him. Eames was inserted in the Doukakis household as a last-minute replacement for the family nanny, to scope out the family dynamics. The original nanny had had to return suddenly to Malaysia to care for a sick relative. A sick relative who it turned out had come into a surprising cash windfall.

Arthur also had his work cut out, as he needed to know as much as could possibly be established through non-extraction channels about what Doukakis’ firm was up to, in order to make the call as to whether what they learned in the dream was the real deal.

Eames went to work for the Doukakises under the guise of being a postgrad student at UT Austin, trying to supplement his stipend over the summer. After ten days of exhausting chasing, ball games, throwing in the pool, dangling upside down and generally entertaining a six and eight-year-old on their school holiday, he was starting to get something of an idea as to how the family worked. When he checked in with the team after work he found Cobb secluded away in a corner, talking to Mal on his phone, and Arthur peering at scrolling figures on a computer screen and generally looking as if he hadn’t left the workshop for about four days straight.

“How are those crunchy numbers coming along, sweetheart?” Eames had asked, leaning over Arthur’s shoulder to stare at the incomprehensible figures on the screen.

“Jesus, Eames!” exclaimed Arthur shying away from him. “You stink!”

“That, my friend, is the healthy outdoorsy smell of a man who has been playing piggyback-wars with two small boys and their Dad for the last couple of hours in this ridiculous steam bath you call a climate.”

“Wait, Doukakis? That’s not right. All the info we have on him says he is never home before 8pm … Dom!” Arthur yelled across the workshop.

Eames pulled up a chair and took a long drag on his water bottle. He really just wanted to pour it over his head, but Arthur would probably get all arsey with him if he was damp as well as stinky and dripped on his papers during the planning meeting.

“Why’s Doukakis breaking his pattern, Dom?” Arthur demanded, once they were gathered together. “I don’t like it when things start changing for no reason just before a job.”

“It’s not ‘no reason’, I’m there,” said Eames, smugly.

“Shut up, Eames,” said Arthur dismissively, “what’s going on, Cobb?”

Cobb, who’d been managing surveillance on Doukakis, shook his head, “I don’t know for sure, but he has certainly broken his routine. He’s been home just after five o’clock four times in the last ten days and what we have from the security records indicate that he hasn’t left work as early as that more than once every few months for the last eighteen months. What do you think, Eames?”

“Well,” drawled Eames smugly, “I rather think we are going to have to adjust our plans a little. Basically, I think Mr Doukakis’ new work-life balance has rather a lot to do with a certain, rather studly young UT Austin student who’s taking care of his kids at the moment.”

“Wait, Doukakis is gay?” queried Dom sceptically, “I don’t know. There isn’t a hint of that in any of the research we’ve done. Are you sure, Eames?”

“Ye-hep. Can’t speak about what he might or might not have been getting up to before now. He could be in deep, deep denial about himself or he could just be very circumspect about how he acts on his inclinations, but he was inclining all over me this afternoon and that’s for sure. Piggyback-wars is a pretty physical game. I don’t know,” Eames concluded, grinning broadly, “I do look pretty fabulous in khaki shorts and a polo shirt. All cute and clean-cut, but with my tats poking out under my sleeves giving me a bad-boy edge. Maybe I just turned him gay?”

Arthur groaned and dropped his head into his arms on the table.

“Oh yes,” said Eames, nodding, “Arthur knows what I’m talking about! Anyway, the wife gambit won’t work,” he said, focussing back on the business at hand, “I’m not saying he’d happily see her dead, but it won’t be the powerful psycho-emotional threat we need. He’ll be able to think, calculate, and there’ll be too big a chance that he’ll throw us a line, rather than just cough up the details we need.”

“Ok,” said Cobb, processing the new information, “what do you suggest?”

“Well,” said Eames, tipping himself back in his chair, “we could go for one of the kids. He genuinely loves them and I think any threat to either of them would be a major psychological blow. I don’t think he would risk any pussy-footing around or half-truths if their lives were on the line.

“Buuut,” he continued, looking interrogatively at Dom, “that would only be the case if he genuinely had no doubt their lives were at stake. He’s pretty sharp and pretty good at reading people. If he picked up on, I don’t know, the idea that the threat wasn’t genuine, that the kidnappers won’t see it through and really hurt the kids, … well, then I think we’d be in the same position as we are with the wife – there’d be too great a chance that he’d start _thinking_ and realise that we aren’t in any position to verify the half-truths he could feed us and he might decide to try his luck. That company is a major part of his self-identity. He won’t sell it down the river unless he is so panicked he isn’t seeing clearly and sees no other choice. The thing is, Cobb, can you really hurt me, when I’m a white-faced, terrified child, begging you to stop?”

Cobb went a bit green, “I dunno. Arthur, what do you think? I think Eames may have a point, I’m not sure I can …”.

Arthur stared at Eames, assessing him. “Normally, I think I’d jump at a chance to seriously hurt Eames. But, I don’t know … Eames is right, it has got to look one hundred per cent authentic if it is going to work. I think I could slap a kid about, break its fingers, if I knew it was Eames, but I’m not totally sure, I haven’t done it before, and if any of that uncertainty shows through, well, we are back were we started. If we can’t convince him we are child-murdering psychos, we won’t be able to trust what he tells us.”

“Ok,” said Dom, what’s the alternative?”

“I could fuck him,” suggested Eames, “I mean, from what you say, he is far from ‘out’ and the idea of everyone knowing he let his manny fuck him, well, I don’t think he’d take it too well. Plus it has the advantage of a non-time-specific threat. You can only kill the wife or kid when you have them in your possession and swapping them for secrets is a one-time deal. A secret, given in exchange for silence however, has the benefit that if the information exchanged proves to be false, the secret can be revealed in retaliation. He _has_ to tell us the truth, or it is all coming out sooner or later.”

“You think you can manage that?” asked Dom.

Eames blew his cheeks out in a slow huff, pretending to think about it. “Yep,” he said.

“Dom, I’m a forger. At a conservative estimate, at least sixty per cent of my work involves fucking marks, letting marks fuck me or just thoroughly distracting marks with the thought that they _might_ fuck or get fucked by me. The rest of the time I usually spend being someone’s loved one facing dire jeopardy, getting shot or having my fingers broken. You can see why I like the fucking jobs better.”

“Ok,” said Dom, conceding defeat.

“I’m still not convinced,” Arthur spoke up, “we only have Eames’ assessment that Doukakis will go for this. How do we know you will be able to pull this off, Eames? And no,” he finished quenchingly, “this is not an invitation for you to suggest I sample just how tempting you can be.”

“Awww,” Eames sighed in mock disappointment, “OK, well, what I’ll need will be a safe, anonymous location, like a meeting or conference out of state, or even better, abroad.”

“Doukakis is due to attend an industry convention in Hawaii in six weeks’ time,” suggested Dom.

“Perfect!” nodded Eames. “Prior to the job, I’ll drop into conversation that I am giving a paper at a conference in Hawaii around the same time.”

“Won’t that be too much of a coincidence?” asked Arthur.

“No, I won’t be specific. If I just plant in his mind the idea that I _might_ be in Hawaii at the same time as him, it’ll make a dream scenario where we bump into one another in a hotel lobby there perfectly plausible.”

Arthur continued to look sceptical.

“Look, OK, we don’t have a better plan than this, if you two aren’t prepared to man-up to some serious GBH on an eight-year-old. So I understand that some of you aren’t happy in placing all your trust in my magnificent sexual allure, and yes, Arthur, I think this is the appropriate juncture to suggest that those in doubt are welcome to knock on my hotel door for a test drive, only not you Dom. No offence, man. Anyway, if we play the Hawaii scenario as a first level, get a verbal from the mark and then go into a level two for a straight-forward safe-break, you can compare the two sets of data for ultimate reliability or, worse case scenario, if he proves immune to my charms, we have the incomplete secret object data and have to re-group for confirmation.”

“Sounds, viable to me,” said Dom, nodding. “Arthur?”

Arthur stared at Eames from under his brows for a minute, considering, before he nodded slowly, too.

“Right,” said Dom. “Let’s break for today and Arthur and I can start preparation tomorrow morning. I think we’ll bring Frankie in on this?” He looked questioningly at Arthur again, who nodded. “Great, I’ll go call him now.” He headed back to his easy chair in the corner and picked up his phone.

Arthur continued to stare quizzically at Eames.

“I can’t tell,” Eames pondered aloud, “if you are trying to imagine me as an eight year old, because you think the kidnap plan might still be the better option, or if you are imagining me banging Doukakis.”

Stefan had asked him once if it was difficult for him, putting himself out like sexual bait, job after job. Eames had assured him it wasn’t a problem; that it wasn’t _his_ body after all. It hadn’t seemed appropriate to explain that it wasn’t all that different from the games he played with Stefan. That the major attraction, aside from the physical gratification of getting off, was the thrill of the chase, the bending of another person’s will to your will, against their better judgement, against their best interests and against the promises they might have made to themselves and others. Sex was sex and it was also a lot like winning and Eames really liked to win.

“You are a piece of work, Mr Eames,” said Arthur contemplatively, leaving the table.

Eames followed him into the elevator. “So,” he murmured in Arthur’s ear, “when you finally give in to the inevitable, Arthur, are you going to fuck me, while telling me what a terrible slut I am, or are you going to let me fuck you while I tell you what a cock-hungry little whore you are for letting a slut like me fuck you?”

Arthur’s elbow flew up into Eames’ windpipe at the same time as his heel connected sharply with Eames’ shin and Eames crumpled to the floor as Arthur exited the elevator without looking back. Eames was able to breathe and right himself in only moments, though. Arthur hadn’t really been trying, which practically made it a gesture of affection, Eames thought. At least he hadn’t shot him, which definitely meant he was warming to him.

*

Eames walked across the hotel lobby, wearing a suit like a man more comfortable in shorts and sneakers. He saw Doukakis at the reception desk, who turned at just the right moment, so Eames could beam with unfeigned delight and bound up to him.

“Hi there, Mr Doukakis!”

“Oh hi, Chris!” Doukakis smiled and collected his key card from the clerk. “I guess we did overlap. Have you given your paper yet?”

“Yeah, just this afternoon.” Eames continued to stare into Doukakis’ eyes like he was overjoyed to see him.

“How’d it go, then?” Doukakis asked, encouragingly.

“Oh. Really well, actually. At least I think so. I’m pretty pleased, anyway.” And he ducked his head, bashfully, before grinning compulsively into Doukakis’ face.

“Well, hey, let me get you a drink to celebrate, then.”

If it was possible, Eames’ smile got wider still. “That would be really nice! But,” uncertain, “aren’t there things you need to be doing with your, you know, clients and stuff, Mr Doukakis?”

“No, I’m free this evening. And call me Jon.” Doukakis too, couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

 _The whole evening, huh? This is going to work nicely_ , Eames thought. They took a table in the hotel bar by the window, where the late afternoon sun filled the air with a sultry warmth. Eames immediately took the opportunity to doff his jacket and tie and roll up his shirt sleeves. “God, it’s good to get out of this rig!”

They talked together, as the sun sank behind the palm trees, about nothing in particular, just absorbed in one another’s company. Eames lounged his legs, as if relaxed by the warmth and the alcohol, laughing at some little joke Doukakis had made about one of his colleagues. His calf came to rest against Doukakis’, who made no move to shy away. Personal space successfully breached, Eames made no further attempts to push Doukakis’ boundaries in public, just turned up the warmth of his gaze a few notches. Doukakis, slightly overwhelmed leaned back and ran his hand over his face, but still didn’t shift his leg away from Eames’.

“I probably shouldn’t keep you up like this, Jon, you must be pretty tired. After all you only got back from Philadelphia last week and you were in Korea just before that. You work really hard.” Eames said sympathetically, holding his breath to see if Doukakis would take the exit offered, or the invitation to increased intimacy.

“No, I’m all right Chris. I guess I do work pretty hard, so I deserve a little time to relax. But, it’s hard, you know… ” And Doukakis proceeded to outline why his life was hard, while Eames gazed into his eyes and murmured understanding, admiration and encouragement as appropriate. Really, it wasn’t rocket science.

The bar had started to empty and the stars to come out, when, in a lull in the conversation, Eames nodded towards the window. “You can really hear the ocean, huh?”

“Yeah, have you been on the beach yet?”

“No, I’ve been stuck in seminars all day,” Eames replied ruefully and again waited to see if the lure would be taken, smiling bashfully over at Doukakis.

“You can see the ocean from my balcony … maybe some fresh air would be a good idea. We can have a nightcap up there?” Doukakis suggested, the colour running into his face and then out again as he realised what he had done.

Eames didn’t give him a moment to back-pedal, but rose to his feet and said, “Hey, that sounds really nice. I’d really like that.”

They rode up in the elevator and Eames was half-concerned that Doukakis was going to pass out from anxiety. In the hotel suite he allowed Doukakis the space to get them both a beer from the mini-bar. After all, he couldn’t kick Eames out of his room without giving him a drink, even if he was planning to bottle it.

Eames forestalled the latter possibility when Doukakis came out and handed him a beer, by pressing him back against the balcony windbreak and kissing him. They were in shadow here and he rationalized that Doukakis would panic less, the less exposed they were. It could have gone either way, but Doukakis responded to the kiss as Eames worked himself up against him. _Ker-ching!_ he thought.

Twenty minutes and one blow-job later, he had Doukakis spread out on the bed under him, which was when Dom and Arthur, who had been monitoring the room via a concealed camera, burst in. Cameras were waved, pictures were taken and Doukakis was challenged to co-operate with them or risk exposure.

As it turned out, it was just as well that Dom was handling this initial part of the interrogation, because neither Arthur nor Eames were paying any attention to Doukakis at all. Dom loomed threateningly over Doukakis, who was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Arthur stood frozen behind him, his camera hanging forgotten in his hand. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Eames since entering the room. The photographs he’d taken would probably have been of the nightstand or carpet.

Eames lay back against the tangled sheets, his skin glistening with sweat from the balmy night and his cock still flushed and full. He glowed with satisfaction. Eames loved being right at the best of times and now he got to be right in the face of all Arthur’s scepticism. He’d _nailed_ this job: Doukakis was folding like a cheap suit. And even better, he’d finally secured one hundred per cent of Arthur’s attention. Arthur was staring at him like he could eat him with his eyes, his gaze roving over Eames’ naked body. Eames was too jubilant even to smirk, he just stared intently back at Arthur, consuming his scrutiny as hungrily as it was given. He ran his tongue over his lips and watched in delight as Arthur’s eyes followed its course. Too perfect!

“Arthur. Arthur!” Dom broke in and Arthur’s face flushed rapidly with fury at himself as he realised what he had been doing.

Doukakis, sobs shaking his whole body, was falteringly beginning to tell them what they needed to know, in between seeking assurances that it would be all right, that they wouldn’t tell anyone anything and trying to explain about his family and the pressure he was under. Dom ended up concentrating mostly on reassuring Doukakis, rather than threatening him, in order to hold him together enough to talk. Arthur listened and memorized what was said, checking it mentally against the research he had done into the company.

Eames decided he probably wasn’t needed any more. Doukakis was having a nervous breakdown, so didn’t even notice when Eames rolled from the bed and headed into the bathroom, delighted all over again to notice Arthur’s eyes involuntarily twitch to his body as he moved.

When Eames returned with a very small towel tucked around him (well, it seemed a shame to cover up when Arthur was so clearly appreciating the show) they already had Doukakis unconscious again and the PASIV out. They were going into the second level now, to verify the information, not that they needed to, in Eames’ opinion. Doukakis had sung like the proverbial canary and Eames would stake his pay cheque that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to lie to them.

Eames was staying at this level to maintain the dream and manage the transitionary kick. Arthur had already wired Doukakis to the PASIV and was settling into a chair and fixing his own line. Eames checked Dom was ready too, then crouched over the PASIV.

“Hey, Eames, no feeling up Arthur while he’s asleep, OK?” said Dom, just as Eames depressed the chemical feed. The look of panic on Arthur’s face as he lost consciousness was priceless.

 _Cobb really is a bastard_ , thought Eames, admiringly. On the other hand, it meant that he had noticed what had passed between Eames and Arthur and that Arthur was now aware of the fact, which meant Arthur would likely be in a particularly pissy mood when he woke and Eames wouldn’t get the opportunity to ‘follow up’.

Eames contemplated molesting Arthur as he slept, but ended up dismissing the idea. For one thing, it would spoil the fun of things when he really got Arthur’s clothes off and Eames was more and more determined to reach that goal. For another thing, notwithstanding the realistic Hawaii heat, Arthur was wrapped in the usual immaculately arranged layers – of linen this time, and Eames doubted he would be able to get them all back in place with sufficient accuracy to avoid detection.

One thing he knew for sure was that a non-consensually unwrapped Arthur would never become a consensually unwrapped Arthur and, all things considered, if this was going to be a one-time deal, Eames would rather have Arthur conscious.

Not to mention the fact that a non-consensually unwrapped Arthur was also an Arthur likely to shoot Eames, both in the dream and in reality. So, though Eames checked Arthur’s vital signs more times that was perhaps strictly necessary, he mainly contented himself with watching his sleeping form.

It was funny. Eames couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken such trouble in pursuit of some action. Well, not when he wasn’t paid for it, anyway. Usually it was pretty easy to pick up whoever it was who caught his eye, or he lost interest and passed on to someone else if it all looked like too much hard work. These days his desire for the challenge of the chase was more than met by the demands of his work. In his off time, he tended to favour the easy. Once the allotted dream-time had passed and Eames heard the strains of the music Frankie was playing him, Eames popped the headphones on Arthur, tracing his finger just once around the whorl of Arthur’s ear, and clicked the track into gear.

He had been right. Arthur was in a particularly caustic mood when he woke, despite the undeniable success of the job. He snapped the gear back into its case and the three of them left Frankie, dressed in the overalls of a masseur, in a private treatment room of Doukakis’ gym with the sleeping mark.

Arthur twitched his tie. “You better not have touched me, Eames,” he grumbled.

“Oh, I was _all_ over you, mate!” Eames smiled at him. That’s what he liked about Arthur. He knew Eames hadn’t touched him. Not because he trusted Eames or simply because he could tell from his clothes, but because he was sharp. He could read people nearly as well as Eames, even if it was in a stiff, binary data sort of way, rather than the instinctual, pheromone sniffing knowledge Eames had. Outside the gym, they went their separate ways.

“Shame you don’t get to keep the pictures as a souvenir, Arthur. If you want, I could send you some. I’ve got plenty,” was his parting shot.

 

***

 _V: Paris_

To Eames’ surprise, it was only four days before he heard from Cobb again.

“Hi, Eames, how soon can you come and do a job in Paris?” Cobb asked, without preamble.

“Ah Mr Cobb, just a moment. Stefan, love, would it be possible to get Vasili to take care of the clean-up here – Cobb wants me in Paris? … mmm, OK … Mein Schatz! All right, Cobb, looks like I’m finished over here. I’m in Odessa. I would say I can be in Paris in six-to-eight hours, if nothing goes amiss.”

“That’s great, Eames. Call me on this number when you arrive.”

“Rightio! Oh and do pass on my warmest regards to Arthur.”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that, Eames,” said Cobb, with a wry smile in his voice, hanging up.

 _Excellent_ , thought Eames, pleased that a rather tricky job of suborning the security chief of a big-time Russian gangster had passed off so well.

*

The Paris job, it turned out, was a follow-up for one Cobb and his team had managed earlier in the year. They’d successfully pulled the data on a new preparation from a senior technician of a large pharmaceutical company. The client, another pharmaceutical that had invested millions of euros in the same research field, had then contacted Cobb again to confess that the data already retrieved had proved insufficient to replicate the work done, and that they needed more detail.

It made sense to take the job. The research already undertaken would mean they could move quickly, but Cobb was getting increasingly antsy about being away from home as Mal’s due date approached. Cobb’s unusual state of distraction in turn perturbed Arthur. Arthur seemed torn between his own sympathetic anxiety about Mal’s first pregnancy and his understanding of Cobb’s nervousness and, at the same time, frustration at the job being run sloppily and irritation at himself for his own state of impatience.

Eames didn’t really mind. It wasn’t like it was a dangerous job. If it didn’t come off no one would get their heads blown off and a twitchy Arthur was a susceptible Arthur. In place of the unshakable disregard Arthur had maintained towards him previously, Eames’ steady circling was starting to illicit the little signs exasperation that reassured him Arthur was definitely still paying attention. They drove each other mad. Eames focussing far more attention than he could spare on Arthur and Arthur, infuriated by it, retaliating by trying to deny Eames the reciprocal attention he craved.

The job itself presented quite a challenge. It was almost a shame no one was really concentrating on it properly. The chief chemist, who the client was convinced held the key to the implementation of the formula, had proved immune to the approaches they had tried in the real world. This had included putting quite serious pressure on him, and his psychological resilience suggested that blackmail would be difficult to pull off.

In addition, the information that they needed to secure from him was highly specialised, to the extent that the client had had to provide a staff member to go into the dream with them to receive the information and ask any follow-up questions necessary to avoid the debacle of the need for a third extraction. Emilija was a doctoral student whose sponsorship through university by the client entitled them to the fruits of her research and also, it seemed, to demand of her that she assist with the operation.

Emilija’s previous forays into the criminal underworld, Eames quickly surmised, had been limited to deliberately not returning library books by the due date. Arthur had managed the introductions at the start of the job.

“Emilija, this is Eames. He’s a forger, which means you will work alongside him in whatever pose we deem can best elicit the information you will be interpreting for us. Do not sleep with him. Eames fucks people like it is a basic courtesy, like remembering someone’s name.”

Eames made a small noise of protest, but Arthur continued. “In fact, he is statistically more likely to fuck you than remember your name.”

“Don’t pay any attention to Arthur.” Eames leaned confidingly towards Emilija, “I’m really very good with names.” And he favoured her with his most sexually predatory smile. He had been gratified to see her struggle to restrain herself from fleeing the room, but still more gratified to see just the faintest quiver of a suppressed smile on Arthur’s lips.

Harassing Emilija made a nice distraction at the points during the day when Eames deemed that needling Arthur was approaching the point where he was likely to be subject to physical injury. Cobb appeared to be oblivious to the disorder in the ranks of his team and had taken to staring out of the window and biting his nails abstractedly.

Eames had decided that he was trying to think of baby names and so peppered his conversation with suggestions. “Montgomery! Not enough Montys in the world today … Eustace! Arthur, are you actually grinding your teeth? You’ll wear down the enamel you know.”

On the first day, they had reviewed the job and tried brainstorming approaches. “Michelet is deeply invested personally in this new process and he isn’t going to give up the information easily,” Arthur had summarized. “As we need Emilija to be able to question him, we obviously can’t go for a hidden object extraction.”

“Wife? Family? Mother?” Eames had asked and Emilija had blanched as if he was suggesting actually hunting down and exterminating the mark’s family.

“No family,” Arthur had replied. “His mother is still alive, but has been institutionalized for the last three years with Alzheimer’s.”

“How about …” Eames mused, “shaking his loyalty to the firm? If we could set up a scenario where he becomes disenchanted with the firm enough to take his formula with him to a competitor? He’d be retaining his own personal stake in the material and we might be able to actually build on his own sense of ownership. If he was sufficiently ticked off with MelPharm, enough to want to leave in a big old huff, he’d take his secret with him and use it to secure himself a comparably high-status role with a competitor. He’s personally ambitious?”

“Well, not markedly,” replied Arthur frowning. “Typical lab nerd really. His loyalty is to the project, to his intellectual curiosity. He doesn’t want to set up a new research base from scratch when the personnel and equipment he has at MelPharm are all to his exact specifications.”

“Ok then, if the project were threatened from within MelPharm, some suggestion it was to be side-lined, pulled or even just back-burnered for strategic competitive advantage, might he not want to continue elsewhere, rather than see his pet project shelved?” Eames continued.

“He might … Dom?” Arthur prodded.

“Yeah, I guess that is a potential angle. We’d need a lot of control though, maybe even a second forger, if we are going to have to steer through a number of MelPharm personnel …” said Dom, thinking aloud.

Once it had been agreed that the disgruntled employee route was worth pursuing, at least initially, they started work. Eames got himself into MelPharm as an industry journalist, in order to get to know the Michelet’s chief lab assistant, who, it was decided, would be best-placed to influence Michelet’s response to the threat to his project. A second forger, Theresa, had been brought in to cover the managing director of Michelet’s section, whom Arthur had identified as the individual within the organisation with ultimate control over Michelet’s project. Eames-as-Arno would introduce Michelet to his girlfriend, Emilija, who worked for the rival company and who would be able to assist in the transition of the project.

With the addition of Theresa to the team, the working environment disintegrated still further. Emilija was deeply unhappy with her involvement with the whole thing and though she dare not actually withdraw, she was fretfully anxious and tearful by turns. Theresa was a pathologically self-absorbed young woman, with the concentration span of a two-year-old when it came to elements of the job that did not immediately revolve around her role. She would sit in planning sessions gazing up at the ceiling, revolving from side to side in her chair and fiddling with her split-ends. She seemed to make Emilija unaccountably emotional and Arthur furious. Dom had woken up to the fact that the job was on the verge of floundering badly and had roused himself to take control of affairs, which had helped slightly.

Arthur’s frustration with how things were going, with Dom for letting things get in a state and with himself for not having been able to manage things in Dom’s place had given him an uncharacteristically short fuse. He had leapt to his feet yelling obscenities when Eames had crept up behind him and asked what cologne he wore whilst running his nose up the nape of Arthur’s neck, his breath stimulating all the little hairs there to stand up on end. This in turn had caused Emilija to run from the room in tears and Theresa to give vent to a long, put-upon sigh and head shake that Eames had feared might cause Arthur to jump on her and rend her limb from limb.

“I’m going out. For a coffee.” Arthur had said tightly, managing barely to rein in his temper.

“Smashing idea!” Eames had chipped in brightly, “I’ll come with you.” Arthur – who already had his back turned on his way out of the room, had frozen briefly and then clearly decided that exiting the room as quickly as possible was the only way to avoid completely losing his dignity by throwing himself down on the floor in a raging shit-fit –had kept on walking.

In the clattering lift that served the apartment building they were working from, Eames stood unnecessarily close to Arthur. The lift clanged to a halt before the ground floor and an elderly Parisienne entered with two dachshunds and Eames had to stand even closer.

“You know, you’re awfully tense Arthur. I could suck you off, if it would help? Aprés vous, Madame!” He ushered the lady out of the lift ahead of them when it clanged to a halt again. She smiled graciously, either not understanding Eames’ earlier statement or being terribly French about it.

“Your accent is atrocious,” Arthur said.

“Well, you know …” Eames shrugged carelessly, grinning.

“Il est une courtoisie de base de faire un effort, Eames.”

“Ooh, say my name in foreign again!”

“Tu es déplorable,” Arthur muttered, exiting the lift.

Out on the street, Eames had given Arthur a minute or two’s respite, after all, no one wanted to be left a crippled and bleeding heap on the streets of Paris.

“So,” Eames started again conversationally, “when you said all forgers were sociopaths I thought you were being a dick, but clearly I had not yet had the pleasure of working with Theresa. She is fucking infuriating.”

“I was completely justified in my assessment. You are both _fucking terrible_ human beings and insufferable to work with,” Arthur snapped.

“Oh come on! That’s hardly fair. At least I can maintain eye contact with people outside of a forge and I can convincingly take part in conversation that isn’t all about me for, oh, minutes and minutes at a stretch … where are we going, by the way?”

“My hotel.”

“Oh. Ok.”

Arthur had strode across the lobby of his hotel to the lift, with Eames practically having to trot to keep up. As they trundled upwards in the small lift, they stood face to face, inches apart, Arthur’s face stern and concentrated while Eames watched him, a smile playing upon his lips.

“Arthur,” Eames murmured as they entered Arthur’s room. Without a second’s warning Arthur had him back against the woodwork of the door, his head cracking back against the doorjamb as Arthur pushed him.

“You,” Arthur breathed, “are the fucking bane of my life.” They were pressed chest to chest now and Arthur’s words blew hot and wet across Eames’ cheek. “I have had all I can take and you are going to make it up to me right now. Is that clear?”

“Darling,” Eames’ low voice rumbled with warm laughter, “I thought you’d never ask.”

They kissed then, up against the door, Arthur hungrily and Eames enthusiastic, soaking up Arthur’s heat and intensity. He revelled in finally being able to run his hands down Arthur’s back, through his hair, cupping the back of his head and drawing him deeper into the kiss. He held Arthur against him as he leaned back against the door, nuzzling the junction of ear and jaw and rubbing the stubble of his cheek against the fine soft skin he found there, while Arthur’s breath sounded hot and harsh in his ear.

When he judged he'd had enough of Arthur’s weight in his arms, he swung them round until it was Arthur with his back against the wall beside the door. He assuaged Arthur’s growl of irritation by sliding to his knees in front of him and rubbing his face against the fine wool of Arthur’s trousers, hearing above him the dull thump of Arthur’s head tipping back against the wall. He worked Arthur’s shirt out of the top of his trousers so he could rub the pads of his thumbs over the hot soft skin of Arthur’s hips and up over his ribs as he continued to inhale the smell of him through the wool.

“Eames,” Arthur’s strangled voice called him back to himself. He looked up into Arthur’s face, his pupils blown dark. Eames was beginning to feel disorientated himself; drunk on touch, scent and sounds of Arthur’s hitched breathing.

“Arthur, I…” Eames was strangely overwhelmed, his brain shorting out over the words that hovered on his tongue He took refuge in the familiar, finally undoing the fastenings on Arthur’s trousers.

Eames was a sensualist. To say he’d always enjoyed sex would be somewhat redundant. Still, he couldn’t recall a time when he’d been so caught up and so completely unable to think. It wasn’t as if he customarily recited the names and dates of the Kings of England while fucking someone, but he was usually aware of some portion of his brain smugly cataloguing their reactions and celebrating his own success.

After so long pursuing Arthur, Eames found he couldn’t seem to keep his grip on events. His brain seemed only capable of disjointed, delighted observations:

 _Arthur!  
Arthur, skin.  
Arthur, so hot, Arthur._

He thought he would make less of a fool of himself if he kept these observations to himself. The way Arthur was laughing at him indicated he wasn’t being one hundred per cent successful at this. It didn’t matter though, because Arthur was lying beneath him on the bed. Somehow they’d managed to get most of their clothes off, though Eames was still wearing one sock.

Arthur’s skin was smooth and hot, pitted with occasional scars and entirely and devastatingly at Eames’ disposal. He crouched above Arthur, tracking the surface of that skin with his lips, tracing the tendons in his neck, the dip of his collar bone. He caught up Arthur’s hand and ran his lips and teeth lightly over the tendons of his wrist before sliding three of Arthur’s fingers into his month.

“Christ!” breathed Arthur hoarsely. His eyes were bottomless black and his lips parted as he watched Eames, who sat back and mapped each of Arthur’s fingers, his palm and the heel of his thumb, as if he was trying to memorize every inch of Arthur with his mouth.

“Are you planning on fucking me or eating me, Eames?” The shortness of Arthur’s breath belied his criticism. Eames felt punch-drunk, his mind working too slowly, his skin on fire and his nerves raw. He wasn’t sure he liked it. The distance between himself and Arthur suddenly distressed him and he dragged Arthur up, gathering him into his arms and hauling him till Arthur was seated, straddling his thighs. Chest to chest was better and he murmured into Arthur’s neck, his nose tickled by the sweat that was starting to curl Arthur’s short dark hair.

“Anything you want Arthur, anything you want.”

*

It was early evening, the streetlights outside stripping the walls of the room orange. Eames slipped out while Arthur was in the shower. He wasn’t usually a bolter, but then having sex with someone didn’t usually leave you feeling like you’d left your outer shell behind somewhere and were standing, facing the elements, soft, pink and vulnerable, like a baby prawn. Because Arthur had looked at him, not scowling, not appraising, not even ogling, just something warm and hot and intense and he had smiled and traced Eames’ tattoos with the pads of his fingers and run his nails over Eames’ scalp and writhed in his arms and been perfect.

Walking through the streets Eames couldn’t shake the sense, beneath his satisfaction, that somehow he had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew. Neither did he stand the remotest chance of turning his mind back to the job, so he just kept walking through the darkening streets. Night had fallen and Eames had bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He wasn’t tired and he didn’t want to go to a bar, which was why he was walking pass a deserted dusty park on the Quai de la Seine when he got the call that would bring everything he had going on, or might have going on with Arthur to a screeching halt.

“Eames? It’s Shachar. Where are you?”

“I’m in Paris. Why?” Shachar paused, and something about the quality of the pause caused Eames to stop in his tracks, turn his back to the wind and cup his hand around the phone to hear better. “Shachar?”

“Eames, … Leonov,” Shachar spoke haltingly, reluctantly. “The security information we pulled. It was used for a job on Leonov’s mansion. It was supposed to be a robbery. The house was supposed to be empty, I heard … but it wasn’t. Leonov’s daughter is dead. He’s … he’s … I don’t know. It’s insane. He’s called out hits on everyone. Everyone involved with the job and the extraction. I don’t know … Rafail, Vera, Vasili, the whole team were dead before I even heard.”

Eames’ pulse started to thunder insistently in his ears. The wind blowing across the canal suddenly drew to his attention how exposed he was.

“They got to Stefan too. Before I could reach him.”

 _Stefan is dead_ , Eames thought. _Was he dead already when I was with Arthur?_ He found himself struggling to keep a grip on the phone, his hands suddenly numb. Then a new thought struck him.

“Shachar, where are _you_?”

“On the road.”

“How long? How long have you been running - when did you hear?” The silence on the other end of the line fuelled his growing disquiet, “have you called Richard or anyone else? … Shachar!”

“I had to get out. I didn’t have time!”

“How long, Shachar?”

“About three, maybe four hours.”

“You’re lying.”

“OK, maybe six.”

“Shit!” _Shit, shit, shit, fuck!_

“Hey, Leonov’s gone mental and frankly the more bodies I put between him and me the better. Stefan. Stefan was the only one I cared about.”

“So why’d you call me at all?”

“Stefan made me promise once, you worthless little shit. Made me promise to … take care of his little piece of ...”

“Fuck you, Shachar!” said Eames, hoarsely, snapping his phone shut. _Shit, shit, shit, _he fought off a wave of nausea.__

 _  
_Ok, six hours … that’s maybe ten hours minimum since the hit was called in Odessa. Shit! Got to get out of Paris, out of France … probably out of Europe._   
_

Eames was running now, up to the bridge where he hailed a taxi. He dismissed returning to his hotel, too dangerous, and instead ordered it to the apartment they’d been working out of.

 _Too late for the airports. Even if I make it onto a plane, they’ll know where I’m going and will be waiting at the other end. Marseille, then._

Train would be fastest, but if they knew he was in Paris, and they must by now, then bolting to Marseille would not be unexpected. There weren’t so many trains a day that they would be hard to comb for him.

 _No, by car … a series of cars … stolen, and minor roads. If I can get to Bibi, he can get me on a boat. Hope the Russians and North Africans aren’t getting on any better than they were last time I was there._

He wasted no time once he reached the office cracking open the safe. He found a bag and tipping the files out of it emptied the safe of their exit money and the firearms and ammunition that were stored there.

The lights flicked on, and _fuck_ , he hadn’t even heard anything and this was going to be the shortest flight from mob justice in history if he couldn’t get his shit together! He spun round, pistol raised ready to shoot.

“Are you robbing us, Eames?” Arthur asked, relaxed, lounging in the doorway.

 _Arthur_. Eames felt a crushing wave of … what … guilt? Something, anyway, that he was totally unequipped to deal with. “In effect, yes,” he replied lightly, if slightly unevenly. “You aren’t going to be difficult about it are you?” He kept the gun trained on Arthur and noticed his body shift imperceptibly as he recognised the threat.

“What are you doing Eames?” Arthur’s voice was low, warning.

“Something’s come up, darling, and I have to leave town.” He managed to keep the hysteria out of his voice. Instead it came out cold and sneering. “You aren’t going to be annoying and clingy now are you, just ’cos I fucked you?”

It took only a moment for Arthur to process this and his eyes narrowed. “What about the job, Eames? You just going to fuck off and leave us all in the lurch?” Arthur’s voice was menacing now, angry, as if he were the one with the gun, rather than the one with his hands in his pockets, being threatened.

“Like I said, darling, something came up. Now … get out of my fucking way.” Eames growled. His pulse was hammering in his ears and he couldn’t quite hear what he was saying and he couldn’t quite look Arthur in the eye, though he still had his gun trained steadily on his heart.

He heard footsteps then, pounding in the stairwell behind Arthur, and backed hurriedly to the window, dropping the bag and drawing a second gun, but it was Dom who appeared out of breath behind Arthur. It took Dom half a second to assess the situation and he stepped smoothly between Arthur and Eames.

“Deyneka called me and told me about the hits,” he said by way of explanation, choosing to ignore the raised weapons in Eames’ hands. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Deyneka knows?” Eames could no longer hide his rising panic. “Fuck! Every little shit between here and Cadiz is going to be on the lookout for me!”

Dom didn’t contradict him, just nodded, glancing at the open safe. “You’ve got some cash. You’d better get moving. You want the car?”

“No, I … I’ll take one. Harder to trace.” Eames tucked one of the guns away and picked up the bag again. He swallowed “Thanks, Cobb.” And he slipped past him down the stairs, still not looking into Arthur’s white, furious face.

“Good luck, Eames,” said Cobb. “I’m sorry about Stefan.”

“What?” He heard Arthur’s voice distantly as his took the stairs two at a time.

On the street, Eames slid the handgun out of sight, ducked his head down and ran. He didn’t see Cobb or Arthur again for another six years.

***


End file.
